I believe that I shall take it upon myself to speak to Charles about these arrears, for he has that good humour in his composition, that he never takes anything amiss that I say to him, and I am sometimes very free in telling him how opposite my sentiments are to him, and to his conduct.  I should rather say to his conduct, for, personally, I love him, as he would have had no doubt, if he had been like other reasonable people; car avec les defauts les plus insignes il y a quelque fois un brin de raison dans la pluspart des hommes; mais en lui, ce qui est defectueux, l’est radicalement.  He has adopted it with so much earnestness that there is no room for reproof or hope of correction.

(1781,) June 22, Friday.—­I must begin my letter of to-day by contradicting the piece of intelligence with which I concluded my last.  I went to Lady Betty’s yesterday after dinner, who was gone with Mr. Delme to Bray, till Wednesday.  I saw your porter, who is established there, and he told me that no letter from abroad was come; so this came from the vague report of servants who never comprehend truth, or tell it.

I went to White’s, and there met with Lord Loughborough, who goes the Oxford Circuit.  He finishes at Stafford, and from thence goes to Ireland.  He desired me to go upstairs into the supper room with him, to which I had consented, but Williams and Lord Ashburnham,(172) and he and I assembled around the cold stove, till the supper was forgot, and I fell asleep.

I walked home, but called in at Brooks’s as I passed by; Hare in the chair; the General chief punter, who lost a 1,000 pounds.  The bank concluded early a winner, 12 or 1300.  Charles, de cote ou d’autre, told me that he had won 900.  I said that I was informed from the Emperor that he had lost lately 8,000.  He said, in two days, at various sports.  I hinted to him that I had a suit to prefer.  He guessed what it was, and begged that I would not just then speak to him about money.  He was in the right.  I meant to have dunned him for yours.

I told him that I had been reading his character in the Public Advertiser.  The writer says that his figure is squalid and disagreeable.  I told him that my opinion coincided with half of that account, that he was undoubtedly squalid, but if by his figure was meant, as in French, his countenance, it was not a true picture.  He said he never cared what was said of his person.  If he was represented ugly, and was not so, those who knew him would do him justice, and he did not care for what he passed in that respect with those who did not.  The qu’en dira-t-on? he certainly holds very cheap, but he did (not?) explain to me exactly to what extent proceeded his indifference towards it.  I then went home.

To-day we have a late day in the House, but I shall go and dine first at Lord Ashburnham’s in the King’s Road, and to-morrow to my villa at Streatham.  I have bought Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,(173) and repent of it already; but I have read but one, which is Prior’s.  There are few anecdotes, and those not well authenticated; his criticisms on his poems, false and absurd, and the prettiest things which he has wrote passed over in silence.  I told Lord Loughborough(174) what I thought of it, and he had made the same remarks.  But he says that I had begun with the life the worst wrote of them all.