_April 2nd._--My birthday: a day of no joy to me, and which I always gladly hasten over. There is no pleasure in reaching one's fifty-third year and in a retrospect full of shame and a prospect without hope; for shameful it is to have wasted one's faculties, and to have consumed in idleness and frivolous, if not mischievous pleasures that time which, if well employed, might have produced good fruit full of honour and of real, solid, permanent satisfaction. And what is there to look forward to at my time of life? Nothing but increasing infirmities, and the privations and distresses which they will occasion. I trust I shall have fortitude and resignation enough to meet them, and I pray that I may be cut off and be at rest before I am exposed to any great trials. When we have no longer the faculty and the means of enjoyment in this life, it is better to quit it. With regard to that great future, the object of all men's hopes, fears, and speculations, I reject nothing and admit nothing. Divines can say but what themselves believe; Strong proof they have, but not demonstrative. I believe in God, who has given us in the wonders of creation irresistible--to my mind at least irresistible--evidence of His existence. All other evidences offered by men claiming to have divine legations and authority, are, to me, imperfect and inconclusive. To the will of God I submit myself with implicit resignation. I try to find out the truth, and the best conclusions at which my mind can arrive are really _truth_ to me. However, I will not write an essay now and here. Sometimes I think of writing on religious subjects amongst the many others which it occurs to me to handle. Ever since I wrote my book on Ireland, I have been longing to write again, and for more than one reason: first, the hope of again writing something that the world may think worth reading; secondly, because the occupation is very interesting and agreeable, inasmuch as it furnishes a constant object and something specific to do; and thirdly, because I find that nothing but having a subject in hand which renders enquiry and investigation in some particular line necessary is sufficient to conquer idleness. Mere desultory reading does not conquer it, and there is a want of satisfaction in reading without an object. Why then do I not write, when I am conscious that I have a very tolerable power of expressing myself? It is because I am also conscious that I want knowledge, familiarity with books, recollection sufficiently accurate of the little I have read, and that facility of composition which extensive information and the habit of using it alone can give. It is when this struggle is going on in my mind between the desire to write and the sense of incapacity, that I feel so bitterly the consequences of my imperfect education, and my lazy, unprofitable habits. But no more of this now. To-morrow I am going to Newmarket to begin another year of the old pursuits. [Sidenote: THE POWER OF THE PRESS.]