om active business in the world, it affords a good opportunity
for breaking off the commonly dry daily journal, or ledger as it
might almost be called, in which for seventy years I have recorded
the chief details of my outward life. If life be continued I
propose to note in it henceforward only principal events or
occupations. This first breach since the latter part of May in
this year has been involuntary. When the operation on my eye for
cataract came, it was necessary for a time to suspend all use of
vision. Before that, from the beginning of March, it was only my
out-of-door activity or intercourse that had been paralysed....
For my own part, _suave mari magno_ steals upon me; or at any
rate, an inexpressible sense of relief from an exhausting life of
incessant contention. A great revolution has been operated in my
correspondence, which had for many years been a serious burden,
and at times one almost intolerable. During the last months of
partial incapacity I have not written with my own hand probably so
much as one letter per day. Few people have had a smaller number
of _otiose_ conversations probably than I in the last fifty years;
but I have of late seen more friends and more freely, though
without practical objects in view. Many kind friends have read
books to me; I must place Lady Sarah Spencer at the head of the
proficients in that difficult art; in distinctness of
articulation, with low clear voice, she is supreme. Dearest
Catherine has been my chaplain from morning to morning. My
church-going has been almost confined to mid-day communions, which
have not required my abandonment of the reclining posture for long
periods of time. Authorship has not been quite in abeyance; I have
been able to write what I was not allowed to read, and have
composed two theological articles for the _Nineteenth Century_ of
August and September respectively.(311)

Independently of the days of blindness after the operation, the
visits of doctors have become a noticeable item of demand upon
time. Of physic I incline to believe I have had as much, in 1894
as in my whole previous life. I have learned for the first time
the extraordinary comfort of the aid which the attendance of a
nurse can give. My health will now be matter of little interest
except to myself. But I have not yet abandoned the