rain"; a jaunt to Greenwich, a concert at home--the Agujari in one of her humours; a masquerade--"a very private one, and at the house of Mr. Laluze ... Hetty had for three months thought of nothing else ... she went as a Savoyard with a hurdy-gurdy fastened round her waist. Nothing could look more simple, innocent, and pretty. My dress was a close pink Persian vest covered with a gauze in loose pleats...." What else? Oh, a visit to Teignmouth--Maria Allen now Mrs. Ruston; another to Worcester; quiet days at King's Lynn, where "I have just finished _Henry and Frances_ ... the greatest part of the last volume is wrote by Henry, and on the gravest of grave subjects, and that which is most dreadful to our thoughts, Eternal Misery...." Terrific novel: but need I go on? There may be some to whom a description of the nothings of this our life will be as flat as the nothings themselves--but I am not of that party. The things themselves interest me, and I confess the charm. It is the charm of innocence and freshness, a morning dew upon the words. The Burneys, however, can do no more for us than shed that auroral dew. They cannot reassure us of our normal humanity, since they needed reassurance for themselves. Where, then, shall we turn? So far as I am aware, to two only, except for two others whom I leave out of account. Rousseau is one, for it is long since I read him, but my recollection is that the _Confessions_ is a kind of novel, premeditated, selective, done with great art. Marie Bashkirtseff is another. I have not read her at all. Of the two who remain I leave Pepys also out of account, because, though it may be good for us to read Pepys, it is better to have read him and be through with it. There, under the grace of God, go a many besides Pepys, and among them every boy who has ever befouled a wall with a stump of pencil. We are left then with one whom it is ill to name in the same fill of the inkpot, "Wordsworth's exquisite sister," as Keats, who saw her once, at once knew her to be. In Dorothy Wordsworth's journals you may have the delight of daily intercourse--_famigliarmente discorrendo_--with one of the purest and noblest souls ever housed in flesh; to that you may add the reassurance to be got from word and implication beyond doubt. She tells us much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but she sees deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is not only that, knowing her, we are grounded in the rudiments of honour and lovely living; it is to learn that human life can so be lived, and to conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.