March 6.—­Finished third Malachi, which I don’t much like.  It respects the difficulty of finding gold to replace the paper circulation.  Now this should have been considered first.  The admitting that the measure may be imposed is yielding up the question, and Malachi is like a commandant who should begin to fire from interior defences before his outworks were carried.  If Ballantyne be of my own opinion I will suppress it.  We are all in a bustle shifting things to Abbotsford.  I believe we shall stay here till the beginning of next week.  It is odd, but I don’t feel the impatience for the country which I have usually experienced.

March 7.—­Detained in the Court till three by a hearing.  Then to the Committee appointed at the meeting on Friday, to look after the small-note business.  A pack of old faineants, incapable of managing such a business, and who will lose the day from mere coldness of heart.  There are about a thousand names at the petition.  They have added no designations—­a great blunder; for testimonia sunt ponderanda, non numeranda should never be lost sight of.  They are disconcerted and helpless; just as in the business of the King’s visit, when everybody threw the weight on me, for which I suffered much in my immediate labour, and after bad health it brought on a violent eruption on my skin, which saved me from a fever at the time, but has been troublesome more or less ever since.  I was so disgusted with seeing them sitting in ineffectual helplessness spitting on the hot iron that lay before them, and touching it with a timid finger, as if afraid of being scalded, that at another time I might have dashed in and taken up the hammer, summoned the deacons and other heads of public bodies, and by consulting them have carried them with me.  But I cannot waste my time, health, and spirits in fighting thankless battles.  I left them in a quarter of an hour, and presage, unless the country make an alarm, the cause is lost.  The philosophical reviewers manage their affairs better—­hold off—­avoid committing themselves, but throw their vis inertiae into the opposite scale, and neutralise the feelings which they cannot combat.  To force them to fight on disadvantageous ground is our policy.  But we have more sneakers after Ministerial favour than men who love their country, and who upon a liberal scale would serve their party.  For to force the Whigs to avow an unpopular doctrine in popular assemblies, or to wrench the government of such bodies from them, would be a coup de maitre.  But they are alike destitute of manly resolution and sound policy.  D—­n the whole nest of them!  I have corrected the last of Malachi, and let the thing take its chance.  I have made enemies enough, and indisposed enough of friends.

March 8.—­At the Court, though a teind day.  A foolish thing happened while the Court were engaged with the teinds.  I amused myself with writing on a sheet of paper notes on Frederick Maitland’s account of the capture of Bonaparte; and I have lost these notes—­shuffled in perhaps among my own papers, or those of the teind clerks.  What a curious document to be found in a process of valuation!