Wilding, enclosing an
invitation to me to be one of the stewards of the anniversary dinner of
the Literary Fund.
No, I thank you, gentlemen!
March 27th.--Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the
British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a
person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a
weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin
marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime,
and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into
building-stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust two thousand
years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many
successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them.
The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our
earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately
around us; yet we heap up these old shells, out of which human life has
long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not see how future ages are
to stagger onward under all this dead weight, with the additions that
will be continually made to it.
After leaving the Museum, I went to see Bennoch, and arrange with him our
expedition of to-day; and he read me a letter from Topper, very earnestly
inviting me to come and spend a night or two with him. Then I wandered
about the city, and was lost in the vicinity of Holborn; so that for a
long while I was under a spell of bewilderment, and kept returning, in
the strangest way, to the same point in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
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