I am glad you are reading those books. To be sure, you are reading Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ only now. I knew that, the _Memoires de Retz_, Shakespeare, and a great part of the Bible, almost by heart before I was eleven years old; so then there was not a thought left for me to think upon manners, men, imagination, or morals. Everything is in those books. On scientific subjects I never could understand other people’s thoughts, and am guiltless of having had one of my own even on the simplest question. My sentiment, later in life, I took by the lump, in absolute cwts. out of _Corinne_[225] and Lord Byron’s Poems, and so, as I said before, I have never had a thought of my own and I do not believe any of us can, in the way we are all educated; and I suppose it is lucky, as they would be foolish thoughts probably if they came. God bless you, dear, and go on getting better. Your ever affectionate E. E. _Miss Eden to Miss Villiers._ BOWOOD, _September_ 24, 1826. MY DEAR THERESA, I am in such a bad mood for writing, that I could not set about it with a worse grace, only you will not write to me if I do not write to you. I am devoted to the arts just now, and to the improvement of my small mind, which I have brought to a high state of cultivation by studying fifteen books at a time, some of them amazingly abstruse, such as the _Life of James Mackoul the Housebreaker_--very improving. Also I have finished my Denham’s _Travels_, and the _Life of Professor Clarke_ and _Les Barricades_,[226] a diluted sort of history, partly history and partly dialogue, which Lord Lansdowne likes because it is the fashion at Paris, but it is uncommonly stupid. And I have been dipping into Pothier’s _Histoire de l’Eglise_,--and in short, if we stay here a week there is no saying how much I shall read, or how little I shall remember.