Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

ThackerayON LETTS’S DIARYMine is one of your No. 12 diaries, three shillings clothboards; silk limp, gilt edges, three-and-six; French morocco,tuck ditto, four-and-six. It has two pages, ruledwith faint lines for memoranda, for every week, and aruled account at the end, for the twelve months fromJanuary to December, where you may set down yourincomings and your expenses. I hope yours, my respectedreader, are large; that there are many fine round sumsof figures on each side of the page: liberal on the expenditureside, greater still on the receipt. I hope, sir,you will be “a better man,” as they say, in ’62 than inthis moribund ’61, whose career of life is just coming toits terminus. A better man in purse? in body? in soul’shealth? Amen, good sir, in all. Who is there so good inmind, body or estate, but bettering won’t still be goodfor him? O unknown Fate, presiding over next year, ifyou will give me better health, a better appetite, a betterdigestion, a better income, a better temper in ’62than you have bestowed in ’61, I think your servantwill be the better for the changes. For instance, I shouldbe the better for a new coat. This one, I acknowledge, isvery old. The family says so. My good friend, whoamongst us would not be the better if he would give upsome old habits? Yes, yes. You agree with me. You takethe allegory? Alas! at our time of life we don’t like togive up those old habits, do we? It is ill to change.There is the good old loose, easy, slovenly bedgown,laziness, for example. What man of sense likes to flingit off and put on a tight guinde prim dress-coat thatpinches him? There is the cozy wraprascal, self-indulgence—howeasy it is! How warm! How it always seemsto fit! You can walk out in it; you can go down to dinnerin it. You can say of such what Tully says of hisbooks: Pernoctat nobiscum, peregrinatur, rusticatur. Itis a little slatternly—it is a good deal stained—it isn’tbecoming—it smells of cigar-smoke; but, allons donc!let the world call me idle and sloven. I love my ease161