In September of 1854, the future popular historian Henry Thomas Buckle wrote to his friend Maria Grey, who was then becoming a powerful advocate of female education, to thank her for returning his much cherished six-volume set of August Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42). He had earlier lent Gray the volumes along with a set of instructions both for reading the difficult work and also for providing for its proper care. He suggested reading the ‘Exposition’ of the first volume but then skipping the analysis of the physical sciences contained in the first three only to return to them after reading the very important, in his mind at least, later volumes on the social sciences. He pressed her to keep Philosophie positive always in a safe place when not reading it, perhaps keeping it in a cupboard, ‘as on several grounds I value it very much, and I never leave it out at home’. When she returned the volumes because she was going on a trip to the country, Buckle expressed regret that she did not take them with her. Such a trip would have been the perfect time to try and get through Comte's rather unpleasant prose, but perhaps more importantly, ‘in the country one particularly needs some intellectual employment to prevent the mind from falling into those vacant raptures which the beauties of nature are apt to suggest’.