And this is the fate of all those personal records which have most deeply interested and charmed us. It is so easy to begin a journal, so difficult to continue it, so impossible to persevere with it to the end. Bacon says that the only time a man finds leisure for such an engrossing occupation is when he is on a sea voyage, and naturally has nothing to write about. Perhaps the reason why diaries are ever short-lived may be found in the undue ardor with which they are set agoing. Man is sadly diffuse and lamentably unstable. He ends by saying nothing because he begins by leaving nothing unsaid. “Le secret d’ennuyer est de tout dire.” Haydon, the painter, it is true, filled twenty-seven volumes with the melancholy record of his high hopes and bitter disappointments; but then he did everything and failed in everything on the same gigantic scale. The early diary of Frances Burney is monumental. Its young writer finds life so full of enjoyment that nothing seems to her too insignificant to be narrated. Long and by no means lively conversations, that must have taken whole hours to write, are minutely and faithfully transcribed. She reads “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and at once sits down and tells us all she thinks about it. Her praise is guarded and somewhat patronizing, as befits the author of “Evelina.” She is sorely scandalized by Dr. Primrose’s verdict that murder should be the sole crime punishable by death, and proceeds to show, at great length and with pious indignation, how “this doctrine might be contradicted from the very essence of our religion,”--quoting Exodus in defense of her orthodoxy. She is charmingly frank and outspoken, and these youthful pages show no trace of that curious, half-conscious pleading with which she strives, in later days, to make posterity her confidant; to pour into the ears of future partisans like Macaulay her side of the court story, with all its indignities and honors, its hours of painful ennui, its minutes of rapturous delight.