human
I now act on the fixed rule _not to take any long journey in the winter months_, except from real duty. Experience guides me, and I refuse even pressure from very friendly quarters.... I am melancholy about this Cabinet and Mr. Gladstone, and ashamed to be an Englishman. All comes to me like a domestic calamity. And Parliament is so overworked that _English_ misrule cannot be corrected. I look on _Ministers in the House_ as nearly our worst nuisance. But I must not begin on our defective and evil institutions....
gpt
The sister-like affection of my honoured friend Anna Swanwick has ... again and again won me to London;... but the place seems never to agree with me. Partly the whirl by night and day, I suppose, is my bane; still more, the endless meeting of fresh and fresh small talk, with the fatigue of _listening_, and the impression on my brain of miscellaneous memories when I ought to sleep. In Oxford, from like causes, I became as it were 'daft,' and from forgetfulness of the right words could not complete an English sentence. A like affection came on me in London last summer, and I had to break away suddenly, to the disappointment of friends, because my own sense of _idiotcy_ was unbearable. Rest and sleep sufficed to restore me when I reached home. The inability to get out the right word, if (for instance) _suddenly_ asked 'to what station I am going,' is enough to make me seem insane or half asleep.... I am increasingly aware that my _brain_ is my weakest part.... On the whole I am healthy, and agile in all movement as are few men of my age (two doctors fancy that _all_ men of eighty-five have pulses as _disorderly_ as mine!)....