funeral; and as he was a man of a fine presence, and looked the mourner well, he was asked to every interment of distinction.  He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins, merely for the pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for.  He carried me with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as often as I could.

I saw the poor child’s funeral from a distance.  Ah, that Distance!  What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination.  A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the spectators,—­the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is swallowed, should be only a sketch, not a finished Dutch picture, when it becomes brutal and boorish.  Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard from a distance.  The grunt and the snuffle, and the whine and the scream, should be all blended in that deep and distant sound, which, rising and falling like the Eolian harp, may have some title to be called the praise of our Maker.  Even so the distant funeral:  the few mourners on horseback, with their plaids wrapped around them—­the father heading the procession as they enter the river, and pointing out the ford by which his darling is to be carried on the last long road—­not one of the subordinate figures in discord with the general tone of the incident—­seeming just accessories, and no more—­this is affecting.

April 9.—­I worked at correcting proofs in the morning, and, what is harder, at correcting manuscript, which fags me excessively.  I was dead sick of it by two o’clock, the rather as my hand, O revered “Gurnal,” be it said between ourselves, gets daily worse.

Lockhart’s Review.[242] Don’t like his article on Sheridan’s life.  There is no breadth in it, no general views, the whole flung away in smart but party criticism.  Now, no man can take more general and liberal views of literature than J.G.L.  But he lets himself too easily into that advocatism of style, which is that of a pleader, not a judge or a critic, and is particularly unsatisfactory to the reader.  Lieut.-Col.  Ferguson dined here.

April 10.—­Sent off proofs and copy galore before breakfast, and might be able to give idleness a day if I liked.  But it is as well reading for Boney as for anything else, and I have a humour to make my amusement useful.  Then the day is changeable, with gusts of wind, and I believe a start to the garden will be my best out-of-doors exercise.  No thorough hill-expedition in this gusty weather.