A cool but fine day. Attended Divine service with Mrs Adams. Mr Martineau officiated and the attendance was quite full, for the first time in my experience. He read the service well, and his sermon was more thoughtful than I have met with heretofore, but it wanted feeling, the peculiar deficiency of the rational Christians. At home we were freed for once from the anxieties of the American news, which did not come. Called at Thomas’s Hotel to see Sidney Brooks and his Wife who have arrived in anticipation of Mrs Frothingham’s coming, and also on Lord and Lady Hatherton who happened to be here passing through. Towards evening I called to see Mr Senior and to return to him his latest Journals. He was alone at first, and we talked of American Affairs, until Baron Marchetti came in, when it turned to the people Mr S met in Switzerland. He offered me any number of his Diaries, and I finally consented to take some volumes of conversations with Tocqueville. I then walked with Brooks across from Prince’s Gate to the Kensington garden gate on the Bayswater side, and then through several squares into the Marylebone Road and thence home. Our dinner was small by reason of the absence of two of our children. In the evening we had a visit from Sidney Brooks and his Wife. The former seems much better than heretofore, and more unreserved than I ever knew him.264