Marcus Antonius' celebrated work, entitled "Of the Things which Concern Himself," would be a good definition of the use and purpose of a diary. Shaftesbury calls a diary "A Fault-book," intended for self-correction; and a Colonel Hardwood, in the reign of Charles I., kept a diary which, in the spirit of the times, he entitled "Slips, Infirmities and Passages of Providence." One old writer quaintly observes that "the ancients used to take their stomach-pill of self-examination every night. Some used little books or tablets, tied at their girdles, in which they kept a memorial of what they did, against their night-reckoning." We know that Titus, the delight of mankind, as he has been called, kept a diary of all his actions, and when at night he found that he had performed nothing memorable, he would exclaim: "Friends, we have lost a day." Edward VI. kept a diary, while that left by James II., so full of facts and reflections, furnished excellent material for history. Richard Baxter, author of one hundred and forty-five distinct works, left a diary extending from 1615 to 1648, which, when published, formed a folio of seven hundred closely-printed pages. Valuable diaries were also left by Whitelock and Henry Earl of Clarendon. _Literary Ingenuity._ Odo tenet mulum, madidam mappam tenet anna. The above line is said, in an old book, to have "cost the inventor much foolish labor, for it is perfect verse, and every word is the very same both backward and forward." _Supposed to be a Genuine Island._ When the Utopia of Sir Thomas More was first published, it occasioned quite a complimentary blunder. This political romance represents a perfect but visionary republic, in an island supposed to have been newly discovered in America. As this was the age of discovery (says Granger), the learned Budæus, and others, took it for a genuine history, and considered it as highly expedient that missionaries should be sent thither, in order to convert so wise a nation to Christianity. _King of India's Library._ Dabshelim, King of India, had so numerous a library, that a hundred brachmans were scarcely sufficient to keep it in order, and it required a thousand dromedaries to transport it from one place to another. As he was not able to read all these books, he proposed to the brachmans to make extracts from them of the best and most useful of their contents. These learned personages went so heartily to work, that in less than twenty years they had compiled of all these extracts a little encyclopædia of twelve thousand volumes, which thirty camels could carry with ease. They presented them to the king, but what was their amazement to hear him say that it was impossible for him to read thirty camel-loads of books. They therefore reduced their extracts to fifteen, afterwards to ten, then to four, then to two dromedaries, and at last there remained only enough to load a mule of ordinary size.