_February_ 9.--A stormy morning, lowering and blustering, like our fortunes. _Mea virtute me involvo._ But I must say to the Muse of fiction, as the Earl of Pembroke said to the ejected nuns of Wilton, "Go spin, you jades, go spin!" Perhaps she has no _tow_ on her _rock_.[160] When I was at Kilkenny last year we went to see a nunnery, but could not converse with the sisters because they were in strict retreat. I was delighted with the red-nosed Padre, who showed us the place with a sort of proud, unctuous humiliation, and apparent dereliction of the world, that had to me the air of a complete Tartuffe; a strong, sanguine, square-shouldered son of the Church, whom a Protestant would be apt to warrant against any sufferings he was like to sustain by privation. My purpose, however, just now was to talk of the "strict retreat," which did not prevent the nuns from walking in their little garden, breviary in hand, peeping at us, and allowing us to peep at them. Well, now, _we_ are in _strict retreat_; and if we had been so last year, instead of gallivanting to Ireland, this affair might not have befallen--if literary labour could have prevented it. But who could have suspected Constable's timbers to have been rotten from the beginning? Visited the Exhibition on my way home from the Court. The new rooms are most splendid, and several good pictures. The Institution has subsisted but five years, and it is astonishing how much superior the worst of the present collection are to the teaboard-looking things which first appeared. John Thomson, of Duddingston, has far the finest picture in the Exhibition, of a large size--subject _Dunluce_, a ruinous castle of the Antrim family, near the Giant's Causeway, with one of those terrible seas and skies which only Thomson can paint. Found Scrope there improving a picture of his own, an Italian scene in Calabria. He is, I think, greatly improved, and one of the very best amateur painters I ever saw--Sir George Beaumont scarcely excepted. Yet, hang it, _I do_ except Sir George. I would not write to-day after I came home. I will not say could not, for it is not true; but I was lazy; felt the desire _far niente_, which is the sign of one's mind being at ease. I read _The English in Italy_,[161] which is a clever book.