Sultry all day with occasional showers and thunder and lightning throughout. Morning passed in reading, and afternoon also. In the evening the family came and took tea. Charles was quite unwell.

Continued Mr. Locke’s Essay p. 76– 121. His division strikes me as so little new that I could almost fancy I had read the book before. I admire his clearness of thinking expression which evidently proceeds too rather from his natural constitution of mind than from study or precision in language. Finished also the first part of Lessing’s Laocoon containing at the close some strictures upon Winkelman’s History of Art, which book I happened to find and brought with me from the Mansion.1

Lucretius book 2, l. 425–623. Curious how he dovetails in poetical passages where his theory comes on dry. A short time spent in reading Bayle’s Letters. O! the literature which these letters describe as crowding from the press and which now is naught.