I was lounging away my June at a pretty village in Kent, with little occupation beyond my own meditations, and no company but my horse and dogs. My sisters were both in the South of France; and my uncle, at whose seat I had pitched my camp, was attending to the interests of his constituents and the wishes of his patron in Parliament. I began after the lapse of a week to be immensely bored; I felt a considerable dislike of an agricultural life, and an incipient inclination for laudanum. I took to playing backgammon with the rector. He was more than a match for me, and used to grow most unclerically hot when the dice, as was their duty, befriended the weaker side. At last, at the conclusion of a very long hit, which had kept Mrs. Penn’s tea waiting full an hour, my worthy and wigged friend flung deuce-ace three times in succession, put the board in the fire, overturned Mrs. Penn’s best china, and hurried to his study to compose a sermon on patience. Then I took up reading. My uncle had a delightful library, where a reasonable man might have lived and died. But I confess I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading. It is a very pretty thing to take down a volume of Tasso or Racine, and study accent and cadence for the benefit of half a dozen listening belles, all dividing their attention between the work and the work-basket, their feelings and their flounces, their tears and their trimmings, with becoming and laudable perseverance. It is a far prettier thing to read Petrarch or Rousseau with a single companion, in some sheltered spot so full of passion and of beauty that you may sit whole days in its fragrance and dream of Laura and Julie. If these are out of the way, it is endurable to be tied down to the moth-eaten marvels of antiquity, poring to-day that you may pore again to-morrow, and labouring for the nine days’ wonder of some temporary distinction, with an ambition which is almost frenzy, and an emulation which speaks the language of animosity. But to sit down to a novel or a philosopher, with no companion to participate in the enjoyment and no object to reward the toil, this indeed--oh! I never could endure a long hour of lonely reading; and so I deserted Sir Roger’s library, and left his Marmontel and his Aristotle to the slumbers from which I had unthinkingly awakened them.