My day passed in the quiet pursuits which render my Diary so exceedingly monotonous. I finished the Odes of Horace which completed my perusal of the book. It has been tolerably thorough this time, and I have for the first time formed an idea of the peculiar qualities of the Poet. Heretofore I was under an impression derived from some of his Anacreontic Poems, that he was a pleasant, Jovial, Epicurean Poet, but I find him now possessed of the Power to fly high into the sublimest regions of Poetry. He has also one great attribute of a Poet which supplies a wonderful charm to his verses, the faculty of happy application of epithets. This forms the superiority of Byron’s muse over that of all modern Poets and it goes a great way to make the fascination of Shakespear. A single adjective will very often form a picture out of the sentence, and the mind has the pleasure of filling up the outline with as much additional colouring as suits the particular taste of each reader.

The remainder of my time was filled up with my common occupation, examining letters of which I found many additional files. They contain much of the gloomy. My Grandmother’s trials were severe indeed. War, her husband absent a rebel with certain danger to himself of death if he should be taken, her Mother dying, her child very ill, a Servant in the house in the last and most dreadful stage of dysentery which at that time pervaded the Country. She was a wonderful woman to go through it so well—The Country too in an extremely poor condition and depressed by an unequal war. I cannot imagine any thing much more gloomy.1

Evening, My brother John, his Wife and child arrived having been two weeks at Long Branch. He looks out of health, although he has grown stout and fat since I saw him which is now three years.2 Conversation and the Mirror.

I had intended to go to town today but it was a cold day with an Easterly wind and heavy rain. The consequence was that I remained very quietly at home pursuing my regular and usual occupation.

Read over a large file of my Grandmother’s letters which I discovered today. She has more of grief than of Joy in her correspondence, and yet she was a cheerful woman. But one remarkable feature in her grief is to be found in the occasions of it. I do not know whether vices are hereditary in families, but it would almost seem so from the number of examples which one meets with. The Smith blood seems to have had the scourge of intemperance dreadfully applied to it. Yet the first example of the race whom I know of, was an exemplary clergyman. A Son, Grandchildren in two branches, and great grandchildren have defied all the efforts of the most careful education.1 Here have been the causes of the bitterest sorrows of our family. Public misfortune and pecuniary losses have been nothing to the wearing sorrow occasioned by deep mortification from personal misconduct. My father was telling me of the family of the Warrens of Plymouth, and we have before us the case of the Everetts. It is not without cause that every member of such families should feel in constant alarm lest an unwary moment plunge him into the vortex which he sees so ready to engulph all about him. This is not out of my mind.

The family here is now quite large. John was not well all day and appeared to be suffering from the weather. I felt cold but otherwise in unusual health. Evening, reading Humphry Clinker to the ladies. It is not without occasional embarrassment, for the style of writing in that day was a little of the coarsest.