The Journal of a Disappointed Man

I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive, fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: e.g., a book on the quadrature of the circle, the gabbertushed fustilugs passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr. Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent, conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday morning. Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey. June 17. Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me. George, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails--and you should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or who haven't been to Oxford--to Merton above all. He also says non so che for je ne sais quoi. June 26. ... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be very preoccupied--or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.