I have received a letter from my father in answer to mine which I can hardly understand. Whether he means to pass off my services which in my own letter I certainly did not mean to overestimate with a sneering expression of approbation, or whether it is merely his way I do not wish to decide.1 My disposition is not to cultivate bad feelings in relation to him. But that my belief in his justice and active interest in his children’s prosperity is not almost destroyed I cannot to myself deny, and this course of his is not calculated to revive the thing.

I have great reason now to congratulate myself upon the course I have at great sacrifice of personal feeling pursued since my marriage, and to be thankful to my Wife who has never hesitated to approve my course although it deprived her of much which she had a right to expect. I hope soon to be prepared to lose every advantage I yet derive from dependence upon my father. For it may not be long before he requires all his means. I shall take no notice of this letter further than to answer like a common agent the business portion.

Walk. After which Ovid and in the Afternoon the Official Correspondence, the size of which shows one thing clearly that my grandfather, was very often absent from the seat of government. No wonder that there was intriguing against him. This was a mistake which drove my father to the opposite extreme. Evening, Miss Austen’s Novels—Mansfield Park which is the most indifferent of them all.

A rainy day with a heavy southerly wind and gloomy as the close of the year and short days commonly are. I am sometimes a little depressed. Went to the Office. Time passed there very quietly. No interruption. Continued my Diary and finished the laborious part of it, the account of my absence which I have enjoyed more in the description than I did in the reality. I am prevented from walking very frequently and fear that I shall soon lose the decided improvement which has taken place in my health since my absence. Nothing material took place.

Afternoon looking at Papers as usual—An immense work and rather 31a perplexing one. I must look at the collections made by others and see how they are made. The MS require immediate attention for they will very soon discourage even my wishes. They will be a good Winter’s Work. Evening Mansfield Park. Miss Austen excels in dialogue and in sketching domestic pictures. But she indulges less in them and more in treatise writing in this work, whence it is not so happy. Read Werther which I am going through a second time for the German.