Sent off proofs and copy, and shall indulge a little leisure to-day to collect my ideas and stretch my limbs.  I am again far before the press.

March 23.—­Lady Scott arrived yesterday to dinner.  She was better than I expected, but Anne, poor soul, looked very poorly, and had been much worried with the fatigue and discomfort of the last week.  Lady S. takes the digitalis, and, as she thinks, with advantage, though the medicine makes her very sick.  Yet, on the whole, things are better than my gloomy apprehensions had anticipated.

I wrote to Lockhart and to Lord Downshire’s Agent,—­G.  Handley, Esq., Pentonville, London.

Took a good brushing walk, but not till I had done a good task.

March 24.—­Sent off copy, proofs, etc.  J.B. clamorous for a motto.

It is foolish to encourage people to expect mottoes and such-like decoraments.  You have no credit for success in finding them, and there is a disgrace in wanting them.  It is like being in the habit of showing feats of strength, which you at length gain praise by accomplishing, while some shame occurs in failure.

March 25.—­The end winds out well enough.  I have almost finished to-night; indeed I might have done so had I been inclined, but I had a walk in a hurricane of snow for two hours and feel a little tired.  Miss Margaret Ferguson came to dinner with us.[230]

March 26.—­Here is a disagreeable morning, snowing and hailing, with gleams of bright sunshine between, and all the ground white, and all the air frozen.  I don’t like this jumbling of weather.  It is ungenial, and gives chilblains.  Besides, with its whiteness, and its coldness, and its glister, and its discomfort, it resembles that most disagreeable of all things, a vain, cold, empty, beautiful woman, who has neither mind nor heart, but only features like a doll.  I do not know what is so like this disagreeable day, when the sun is so bright, and yet so uninfluential, that

    “One may gaze upon its beams
    Till he is starved with cold.”

No matter, it will serve as well as another day to finish Woodstock.  Walked out to the lake, and coquetted with this disagreeable weather, whereby I catch chilblains in my fingers and cold in my head.  Fed the swans.

Finished Woodstock, however, cum tota sequela of title-page, introduction, etc., and so, as Dame Fortune says in Quevedo,

    “Go wheel, and may the devil drive thee."[231]

March 27.—­Another bright cold day.  I answered two modest requests from widow ladies.  One, whom I had already assisted in some law business, on the footing of her having visited my mother, requested me to write to Mr. Peel, saying, on her authority, that her second son, a youth of infinite merit and accomplishment, was fit for any situation in a public office, and that I requested he might be provided accordingly.