Beautiful day and warm. To town. Afternoon at home. Evening at the Mansion.

I went to town today where the principal matter of interest seems to be the news from England by the Liverpool Steamer. It is singular to observe the difference already existing in the relations between the new and old world from the adoption of Steam Navigation. The commercial world is blending into one and the political state of Europe bears more directly upon our’s. The age is one of movement through all of which I see nothing so clearly as the truth of the line of Bishop Berkley, “Westward the star of empire takes it’s way.”1

Home. Finished the fourteenth book of the Annals and read twelve sections of the fifteenth. Memorable is the history of Nero, a man naturally of good disposition but corrupted by power and by the appliances of vice, to so great a degree as to leave a name synonimous with wickedness and cruelty. Lovely evening at my father’s.