wn with creepers to the very chimneys, divided
by the greenest and most velvety of lawns from a many-coloured furnace
of flower-beds, scarcely parted by lush paddocks from the intense
green wall of the coppiced hill, the Wakes has always retained for my
memory an impression of rural fecundity and summer glow absolutely
unequalled. The garden seemed to burn like a green sun, with crimson
stars and orange meteors to relieve it. All, I believe, has since
then been altered. Selborne, they tell me, has ceased to bear any
resemblance to that rich nest in which Thomas Bell so piously guarded
the idea of Gilbert White. If it be so, we must live content with

_The memory of what has been,
And never more may be_.

THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE. _Ipswich: Printed
and sold by John Raw; sold also by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme,
Paternoster Row, London_. 1810.

It may be that, save by a few elderly people and certain lovers of
old _Gentleman's Magazines_, the broad anonymous quarto known as _The
Diary of a Lover of Literature_ is no longer much admired or even
recollected. But it deserves to be recalled to memory, if only in that
it was, in some respects, the first, and in others, the last of a long
series of publications. It was the first of those diaries of personal
record of the intellectual life, which have become more and more the
fashion and have culminated at length in the ultra-refinement of Amiel
and the conscious self-analysis of Marie Bashkirtseff. It was less
definitely, perhaps, the last, or one of the last, expressions of the
eighteenth century sentiment, undiluted by any tincture of romance,
any suspicion that fine literature existed before Dryden, or could
take any form unknown to Burke.

It was under a strict incognito that _The Diary of a Lover of
Literature_ appeared, and it was attributed by conjecture to various
famous people. The real author, however, was not a celebrated man. His
name was Thomas Green, and he was the grandson of a wealthy Suffolk
soap-boiler, who had made a fortune during the reign of Queen Anne.
The Diarist's father had been an agreeable amateur in letters, a
pamphleteer, and a champion of the Church of England against Dissent.
Thomas Green, who was born in 1769, found himself at twenty-five in
possession of the ample family estates, a library of good books, a
vast amount of leisure, and a hereditary faculty for reading.