THE opening entry in A Last Diary was made on March 21, 1918; the closing sentence was written on June 3, 1919. In The Journal of a Disappointed Man the record ended on October 21, 1917, with the one word "Self-disgust." An important difference between the first diary and that now published lies in the fact that the first embodies a carefully selected series of extracts from twenty post- quarto volumes of manuscript in which Barbellion had recorded his thoughts and his observations from the age of thirteen without any clearly defined intention, except towards the end of his life, of discovering them to any.
