70 Prayers and Meditations.
To rise at eight.
To be temperate in Food.
This year has past with so little improvement, that I doubt whether I have not [rather] impaired than encreased my Learn ing *. To this omission some external causes have contributed. In the Winter I was distressed by a cough, in the Summer an inflammation fell upon my useful eye from which it has not yet, I fear, recovered. In the Autumn I took a journey to the Hebrides, but my mind was not free from perturbation 2 . Yet the chief cause of my deficiency has been a life immethodical and unsettled, which breaks all purposes, confounds and suppresses memory, and perhaps leaves too much leisure to imagination 3 . O Lord, have mercy upon me.
Jan. 9, 1774. 107.
Nov. 27. Advent Sunday. I considered that this day, being the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, was a proper time for a new course of life. I began to read the Greek Testament regularly at 160 verses every Sunday. This day I began the Acts.
In this week I read Virgil's Pastorals. I learned to repeat the Pollio and Gallus. I read carelessly the first Georgick 4 .
108.
Apr. 13 [1775], MAUNDY THURSDAY s .
Of the use of time or of my commendation of myself I thought no more, but lost life in restless nights and broken days, till this week awakened my attention.
1 Quoted in the Life, ii. 271. self, but I have suffered much for
2 ' He said to me often,' writes want of it.' Ib. iii. 94. Boswell, ' that the time he spent in 4 Life, ii. 288.
this tour was the pleasantest part of 5 The day before Good Friday,
his life.' Ib. v. 405. Johnson in his Dictionary gives
3 He wrote to Boswell on Nov. 16, Maundy as the spelling, and quotes 1776: 'I believe it is best to throw Spelman's derivation 'from mande, life into a method, that every hour a hand-basket, in which the king may bring its employment, and every was accustomed to give alms to the employment have its hour ... I have poor.' Mr. Skeat, in his Etymo- not practised all this prudence my- logical Dictionary ^ deriving the word
This
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