The chapel is built in Mr. Way's park. The consecration was not amusing. There were numbers of carriages--and his house crammed with clergy--They sanctified the Chapel, and it being a wet day, consecrated the burial-ground through the vestry window. I begin to hate parsons; they did not make me love them that day when I saw them in their proper colours. A parson is a Lamb in a drawing-room, and a Lion in a vestry. The notions of Society will not permit a parson to give way to his temper in any shape--So he festers in himself--his features get a peculiar, diabolical, self-sufficient, iron stupid expression. He is continually acting--his mind is against every man, and every man's mind is against him--He is a hypocrite to the Believer and a coward to the unbeliever--He must be either a knave or an idiot--and there is no man so much to be pitied as an idiot parson. The soldier who is cheated into an Esprit du Corps by a red coat, a band, and colours, for the purpose of nothing, is not half so pitiable as the parson who is led by the nose by the Bench of Bishops and is smothered in absurdities--a poor necessary subaltern of the Church. Friday, Feb{y.} 18. The day before yesterday I went to Romney Street--your Mother was not at home--but I have just written her that I shall see her on Wednesday. I call'd on Mr. Lewis this morning--he is very well--and tells me not to be uneasy about Letters, the chances being so arbitrary. He is going on as usual among his favourite democrat papers. We had a chat as usual about Cobbett and the Westminster electors. Dilke has lately been very much harrassed about the manner of educating his son--he at length decided for a public school--and then he did not know what school--he at last has decided for Westminster; and as Charley is to be a day boy, Dilke will remove to Westminster. We lead very quiet lives here--Dilke is at present in Greek histories and antiquities, and talks of nothing but the electors of Westminster and the retreat of the ten-thousand. I never drink now above three glasses of wine--and never any spirits and water. Though by the bye, the other day Woodhouse took me to his coffee house and ordered a Bottle of Claret--now I like Claret, whenever I can have Claret I must drink it,--'tis the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good speck to send you some vine roots--could it be done? I'll enquire--If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really 'tis so fine--it fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness--then goes down cool and feverless--then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver--no, it is rather a Peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house looking for his trull and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainstcoat,