Arrived at Roda this evening. I have been reading, amongst other things, a book everybody else read thirty years ago, "Les Natchez," and am greatly disappointed with it. I am especially struck with the extraordinary contrast between the masterful sobriety and simplicity of the style, and the far-fetched affectation of the ideas which are, more often than not, distorted, tawdry and inflated, sometimes disgusting and not seldom maudlin in the extreme. This singular discrepancy between form and matter is especially French, and may frequently be traced in the works of their painters and sculptors. No living people has so sensitive a perception of form or so artistic an epiderm, but an ineradicable self-consciousness develops in them a theatrical attitude of mind which too often betrays itself in their artistic and literary conceptions. It is the absolute consent between conception and execution which constitutes one of the chief sources of delight in the art of the Greeks, to whom they are fond, too rashly, of comparing themselves.[41] I notice in the Natchez a peculiar use of comparisons. That mode of adding light and colour to an idea which consists in suggesting analogies, has always been the delight of poets; but Chateaubriand (whose analogies, by the way, are often singularly far fetched and unfortunate) occasionally, in a morbid endeavour to be original, seeks his effects in a suggestion of dissimilarities; I remember an instance: he has been describing with minute and gratuitously sickening detail a mangled heap of dead and dying warriors after a ferocious encounter. "How different," he exclaims, but in more flowery terms, "is a haycock in a field with girls rolling down it!" Few will be disposed to contradict him. His exorbitant personal vanity which continues to peep through everywhere, and makes even his unbounded praise of his country seem an oblique tribute to himself, is droll and nauseating at the same time. Took a stroll in the evening, and met an English baby! pink and delicate like a flower; with cape and cockade complete--a pretty sight. Thick folds of rose and violet-coloured cloud hung along the horizon at sunset, and looked autumnal. I have left eternal summer behind me.