Very pleasant weather. Morning devoted to the answering of several notes which have been on my table for some time. I then went out with Mrs Adams in the carriage. My object first to go to Kensignton and look at some saddle horses for my daughter. Then to the South Kensington Museum to see the collection of articles contributed by the aristocracy the present season for exhibition merely. These consist of all sorts of works of pure luxury. Trinkets, lace, china, vases of gold and silver, seals, glass, antiquities of all sorts. It is an index of an enormous wealth of the nation. I could not help thinking how many of these things had neither use nor beauty to recommend them. On the other hand many were of the most exquisite in art. Some had a value of a different sort, as illustrating the progress of invention. Of these the most interesting to me was a collection of one hundred watches dating all through from the earliest. So it is with guns, excepting that the use of these is so much more open to painful reflections, I could not stop long enough to look at every thing. This is the general object to all such exhibitions in London. They form a method rather of dissipating than concentrating the attention. Evening I continued Stanhope’s Life of Pitt. A long dreary public career. Brooks came home this evening from the Isle of Wight.194