_February 24._—The sins of a journal are like those of life, much offence and a little repentance, minutes applied and months neglected. Last night, for the first time in my life, I was at a religious conversazione. Mr. Fry has it once a fortnight. Mrs. Wilberforce and thirty more, I suppose, began with singing a hymn, and then a prayer, and ended in the same manner; the subject discussed was Providence. Scott, Macaulay, and Fry were the only speakers except myself, who threw in a word or two in a bad manner and not in unison; but I went without preparing the temper of my mind, and it proved to me a mere temptation to sin, as everything is sure to do when we trust in our own strength and do not pray for divine assistance. I like the thing itself much, and the recollection since it passed has produced in my mind a degree of humiliation which might not have been in it had I not gone there. I wished to touch on the state of the King’s health, where the hand of God is so evident; but they would attend only to little and private things, and probably were right. They made every possible event, the most trivial, providential. Scott is a predestinarian, but impresses the necessity of attending to the _means_ by which God acts as much as if the divine decrees were not universal. The next subject is Temptation. _May 22._—My dear friend[223] at Bradfield writes me in a most melancholy strain, on the ill success of her husband’s farming. I doubt I shall lose largely by a scheme which was executed merely to keep him out of greater mischief. The new Bishop of Bristol is in dress and manners much like what we call in Suffolk a leather breeches parson. Somebody called on Mrs. Pelham, and found her lying on a sofa reading a novel, rouged as much as any Madame la Marquise. They thought she seemed to be too high flown to be asked to a sober party of whist. What a gradation of evil amongst the worldly even in the _respectable_ (_soi-disant_) class. An application from Phillips for another edition of the ‘Farmer’s Calendar.’ He printed 2,000 of the fifth, and 1,200 sold in a month; they will all be gone before it can be reprinted. I had 100_l._ for that edition, 40_l._ more for this six months after publication, and in future 25_l._ each succeeding one. How grateful I ought to be, but am not, to God for a success which has smoothed many difficulties, and enabled me much to lessen, in assistance to other circumstances, my debts. The sale is an extraordinary one.