Fine morning. I concluded not to go to town today. My Mother received a letter this morning from my father mentioning the probability of his starting from Washington about this time, and my brother’s family is to accompany him.1

I continued reading Thucydides—The Funeral Oration of Pericles, which partakes much of that style which foreigners are fond of charging upon us. I am also reading Sydney on Government, a work written to refute the singular system of Sir Robert Filmer.2 It has many points, sarcasm, logic, ridicule, and vigor. But the only wonder is that a refutation should ever have been needed. The science of government has been prostituted to the designs of the few servile scoundrels who look to their own interest, cost what it may to the world.

Afternoon, finished the first volume of Seneca. Read also a part of the proceedings of the first Congress under our Constitution, relating to laying an impost.3 How the Southern section of the Union can get over it, I do not see. Evening quiet. My Mother does not seem well at all, today.

Fine day. I remained quietly at home. My time was divided between Thucydides and Sydney in the morning. I read in the former the account of the plague of Athens, which has a peculiar interest at this time from the fact of their being such a thing now in the Country. There is no similarity at all in the symptoms of the two. The old plague seems to have been a fever arising from an overcrowded and ill settled population, this spreads in City and Country through three quarters of the habitable globe. In New York it continues with rather increased virulence, though on the whole it has as yet been tolerably confined in it’s operations there.

Afternoon, I concluded for want of more attractive occupation to 332resume Seneca, so that I took up the second Volume and the Treatise upon Clemency in a Prince. It was addressed to Nero.

I took a drive with my Wife, and we went through Milton round the factories passing a house which certainly has a very imposing appearance. It is an old house lately repaired and much improved. Mr. Greenleaf very politely handed me a Newspaper which contained some late and important news from Europe. The French seem to be again in a state of commotion.1 Mr. Beale and his daughter called in the evening.