.]

For two months nearly that I have been in this country I have not
written a line, having had nothing worth recording to put down. It
is not worth my while to write, nor anybody else's to read (should
anybody ever read these memoranda), the details of racing and all
that thereunto appertains, and though several disagreeable
occurrences have ruffled the stream of my life, I have no pleasure
in recording these; for if their consequences pass away, and I can
forget them, it is better not at any future time to awaken 'the
scorpion sting of griefs subdued.' Of public events I have known
nothing but what everybody else knows, and it would have been mere
waste of time to copy from the newspapers accounts of the
conflagration of the Houses of Parliament or the Durham dinner at
Glasgow. My campaign on the turf has been a successful one. Still
all this success has not prevented frequent disgusts, and I derive
anything but unmixed pleasure from this pursuit even when I win by
it. Besides the continual disappointments and difficulties
incident to it, which harass the mind, the life it compels me to
lead, the intimacies arising out of it, the associates and the war
against villany and trickery, being haunted by continual
suspicions, discovering the trust-_un_worthiness of one's most
intimate friends, the necessity of insincerity and concealment
sometimes where one feels that one ought and would desire to be
most open; then the degrading nature of the occupation, mixing
with the lowest of mankind, and absorbed in the business for the
sole purpose of getting money, the consciousness of a sort of
degradation of intellect, the conviction of the deteriorating
effects upon both the feelings and the understanding which are
produced, the sort of dram-drinking excitement of it--all these
things and these thoughts torment me, and often turn my pleasure
to pain. On arriving in town I went to Crockford's, where I found
all the usual set of people, and soon after Sefton came in. Lord
Spencer's death had taken place the day before; he knew nothing of
the probable arrangements, but he told me that he supposed Althorp
would go to the Admiralty and Auckland to India. But what he was
fullest of was that Mrs. Lane Fox's house was become the great
rendezvous of a considerable part of the Cabinet. The Chancellor,
Melbourne, Duncannon, and Mulgrave are there every day and all
day; they all dine with her, or meet her (the only woman) at each
other's