To rise at eight.
To be temperate in Food.
This year has past with so little improvement, that I doubt whether I have not [rather] impaired than encreased my Learning[1]. To this omission some external causes have contributed. In the Winter I was distressed by a cough, in the Summer an inflammation fell upon my useful eye from which it has not yet, I fear, recovered. In the Autumn I took a journey to the Hebrides, but my mind was not free from perturbation[2]. Yet the chief cause of my deficiency has been a life immethodical and unsettled, which breaks all purposes, confounds and suppresses memory, and perhaps leaves too much leisure to imagination[3]. O Lord, have mercy upon me.
Jan. 9, 1774.
107.
Nov. 27. Advent Sunday. I considered that this day, being the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, was a proper time for a new course of life. I began to read the Greek Testament regularly at 160 verses every Sunday. This day I began the Acts.
In this week I read Virgil's Pastorals. I learned to repeat the Pollio and Gallus. I read carelessly the first Georgick[4].
108.
Apr. 13 [1775], Maundy Thursday[5].
Of the use of time or of my commendation of myself I thought no more, but lost life in restless nights and broken days, till this week awakened my attention.
- ↑ Quoted in the Life, ii. 271.
- ↑ 'He said to me often,' writes Boswell, 'that the time he spent in this tour was the pleasantest part of his life.' Ib. v. 405.
- ↑ He wrote to Boswell on Nov. 16, 1776:—'I believe it is best to throw life into a method, that every hour may bring its employment, and every employment have its hour . . . I have not practised all this prudence myself, but I have suffered much for want of it.' Ib. iii. 94.
- ↑ Life, ii. 288.
- ↑ The day before Good Friday. Johnson in his Dictionary gives Maundy as the spelling, and quotes Spelman's derivation 'from mande, a hand-basket, in which the king was accustomed to give alms to the poor.' Mr. Skeat, in his Etymological Dictionary, deriving the word
This
