. When I go in to Empson or Ellis their tables
are always covered with books and papers. I cannot stick at anything for
above a day or two. I mustered industry enough to teach myself Italian.
I wish to speak Spanish. I know I could master the difficulties in a
week, and read any book in the language at the end of a month, but
I have not the courage to attempt it. If there had not been really
something in me, idleness would have ruined me.'

"I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information,
considering how desultory his reading had been. 'My accuracy as to
facts,' he said, 'I owe to a cause which many men would not confess.
It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon
constructed into a romance.' He then went on to describe the way in
which from his childhood his imagination had been filled by the study of
history. 'With a person of my turn,' he said, 'the minute touches are of
as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events.
Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted
by gazing vacantly at the shop windows. As it is, I am no sooner in
the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French
Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born
or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a
word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys's Diary formed almost
inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall.
I go in at Hans Holbein's gate, and come out through the matted gallery.
The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are
long, and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits,
of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes
surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the
river, have all played their part in my stories.' He spoke, too, of
the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, weaving tales of the
Revolution, and he thought that he owed his command of language greatly
to this habit.

"I am very sorry that the want both of ability and memory should prevent
my preserving with greater truth a conversation which interested me very
much.

"May 21, 1831.--Tom was from London at the time my mother's death
occurred, and things fell out in such a manner that the first
information he received of it was from the newspapers. He came home
directly. He was in an agony of