Conversation took a political turn. Colonel Lawrence defended the
propriety of his recent toast, "The Senate of the United States, the
guardians of a free people," by which a Boston paper said "more was
meant than met the eye." The evening was passed with the ordinary
sources of amusement. I have for some time felt that the time devoted to
these amusements, in which I never made much advance, would be better
given up to reading, or some inquiry from which I might hope to derive
advantage. An incident this evening impressed me with this truth, and I
came home with a resolution that one source of them should no longer
engross a moment of my time.
Harris, the author of Hermes, says, "It is certainly as easy to be a
scholar as a gamester, or any other character equally illiberal and low.
The same application, the same quantity of habit, will fit us for one as
completely as for the other. And as to those who tell us, with an air of
seeming wisdom, that it is men, and not books, that we must study to
become knowing; this I have always remarked, from repeated experience,
to be the common consolation and language of dunces.
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