Even now, I dare not, in the intervals of business, remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand.

What my course of life will be, when I return to England, is very doubtful.

But I am more than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to letters; to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs to Roebuck and to Praed.
In England I might probably be of a very different opinion.

But, in the quiet of my own little grass-plot,--when the moon, at its rising, finds me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand,--I often wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to squander their intellect, their health, their energy, on such subjects as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing.

I comprehend perfectly how a man who can debate, but who would make a very indifferent figure as a contributor to an annual or a magazine,--such a man as Stanley, for example,--should take the only line by which he can attain distinction.