Introduction by Edmund Gosse

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." We bibliophiles agree with Logan Pearsall Smith's doctrine, and none agreed more than Thomas Green. At the age of twenty-five he inherited a fine house in Ipswich, a substantial fortune and a large library. He spent the rest of his life happily reading both the books he inherited, and new ones as they were published, and recorded them and his opinions on them in a diary which he kept for nearly thirty years from 1797 to 1825. Once every two years or so he stirred himself to undertake a tour of some famous beauty spots in England or Wales, but soon returned to his books. In 1810 he published the first few years of the diary, which are reproduced here. A fine example of the mental life of a self-taught 18th Century intellectual.