on of his diary, which is that of a man of
business and of honest intentions, containing many remarkable facts
which had otherwise escaped from our historians.

The literary man has formed diaries purely of his studies, and the
practice may he called _journalising the mind_, in a summary of studies,
and a register of loose hints and _sbozzos_, that sometimes happily
occur; and like Ringelbergius, that enthusiast for study, whose animated
exhortations to young students have been aptly compared to the sound of
a trumpet in the field of battle, marked down every night, before going
to sleep, what had been done during the studious day. Of this class of
diaries, Gibbon has given us an illustrious model: and there is an
unpublished quarto of the late Barre Roberts, a young student of genius,
devoted to curious researches, which deserves to meet the public
eye.[106] I should like to see a little book published with this title,
"_Otium delitiosum in quo objecta vel in actione, vel in lectione, vel
in visione ad singulos dies Anni 1629 observata representantur_." This
writer was a German, who boldly published for the course of one year,
whatever he read or had seen every day in that year. As an experiment,
if honestly performed, this might be curious to the philosophical
observer; but to write down everything, may end in something like
nothing.

A great poetical contemporary of our own country does not think that
even Dreams should pass away unnoticed; and he calls this register his
_Nocturnals_. His dreams are assuredly poetical; as Laud's, who
journalised his, seem to have been made up of the affairs of state and
religion;--the personages are his patrons, his enemies, and others; his
dreams are scenical and dramatic. Works of this nature are not designed
for the public eye; they are domestic annals, to be guarded in the
little archives of a family; they are offerings cast before our Lares.

Pleasing, when youth is long expired, to trace
The forms our pencil or our pen design'd;
Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face,
Such the soft image of our youthful mind.
SHENSTONE.

LICENSERS OF THE PRESS.

In the history of literature, and perhaps in that of the human mind, the
institution of the LICENSERS OF THE PRESS, and CENSORS OF BOOKS, was a
bold invention, designed to counteract that of the Press itself; and
even to convert this newly-discover