Cloudy and dull. Time divided as usual.

I was very busy all the morning in making up the fourth and last of my numbers which has been long delayed. I perpetually ask of myself why I write them at all for nobody in this country cares a sixpence about any thing but his personal advancement. And the ambitious men jostle one another all the time to the edification of all lookers on.

Philoctetes. Gibbons, sixteenth chapter. An amazing master of his weapons but used in a bad cause. The History has failed in it’s effect upon the Christian religion. Evening at home. Reading to my Wife of Nicholas Nickleby, part of a fashionable novel.1 On with Burr.