Heavy rain all day. Confined to the house. Nothing material.

This was the day fixed upon for our return to town, but the rain was so heavy and so incessant that we could not stir a step. My time was principally taken up with Revolutionary History, now dipping into Sparks’ Life of Washington and now into the Memoirs of La Fayette. There is something to be gathered from both. Mr. Sparks is a very laborious man and he has managed to get under his control a considerable proportion of the MS papers of our Revolution, but he is also a dull man and has a set of political notions which are not exactly in accordance with the theory of our system. He does not appear to have added many material facts but he has new details.1 Before night I got tired of both books and the time hung a little heavy.