[5] [Tom Young was commonly known as 'Ubiquity Young,' because you saw him in every place you might happen to go to.] September 5th, 1834 {p.126} [Page Head: HOLLAND HOUSE.] At Holland House yesterday, where I had not been these two years. Met Lord Holland at Court, who made me go. The last time I was with my Lady she was so mighty uncivil that I left off my visits, and then we met again as if there had been no interruption, and as if we had been living together constantly. Spring Rice and his son, Melbourne, and Palmerston dined there; Allen was at Dulwich, but came in the evening, and so did Bobus Smith. There was a great deal of very good talk, anecdotes, literary criticism, and what not, some of which would be worth remembering, though hardly sufficiently striking to be put down, unless as forming a portion of a whole course of conversations of this description. A vast depression came over my spirits, though I was amused, and I don't suppose I uttered a dozen words. It is certainly true that the atmosphere of Holland House is often oppressive, but that was not it; it was a painful consciousness of my own deficiencies and of my incapacity to take a fair share in conversation of this description. I felt as if a language was spoken before me which I understood, but not enough to talk in it myself. There was nothing discussed of which I was altogether ignorant, and when the merits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Crabbe were brought into comparison, and Lord Holland cut jokes upon Allen for his enthusiastic admiration of the 'De Moribus Germanorum,' it was not that I had not read the poets or the historian, but that I felt I had not read them with profit. I have not that familiarity with either which enables me to discuss their merits, and a painful sense came over me of the difference between one who has superficially read and one who has studied, one who has laid a solid foundation in early youth, gathering knowledge as he advances in years, all the stores of his mind being so orderly disposed that they are at all times available, and one who (as I have done) has huddled together a quantity of loose reading, as vanity, curiosity, and not seldom shame impelled; reading thus without system, more to cover the deficiencies of ignorance than to augment the stores of knowledge, loads the mind with an undigested mass of matter, which proves when wanted to be of small practical utility--in short, one must pay for the follies of one's youth. He who wastes his early years in horse-racing and all sorts of idleness, figuring away among the dissolute and the foolish, must be content to play an inferior part among the learned and the wise. Some instances there are of men who have united both characters, but it will be found that these have had frequent laborious intervals, that though they may have been vicious, they have never been indolent, and that their minds have never slumbered and lost by disuse the power of exertion.