But let it freeze without, we are comfortable within.  Lady Scott continues better, and, we may hope, has got the turn of her disease.

April 28.—­Beautiful morning, but ice as thick as pasteboard, too surely showing that the night has made good yesterday’s threat.  Dalgleish, with his most melancholy face, conveys the most doleful tidings from Bogie.  But servants are fond of the woful, it gives such consequence to the person who communicates bad news.

Wrote two letters, and read till twelve, and then for a stout walk among the plantations till four.  Found Lady Scott obviously better, I think, than I had left her in the morning.  In walking I am like a spavined horse, and heat as I get on.  The flourishing plantations around me are a great argument for me to labour hard. “Barbarus has segetes?” I will write my finger-ends off first.

April 29.—­I was always afraid, privately, that Woodstock would not stand the test.  In that case my fate would have been that of the unfortunate minstrel trumpeter Maclean at the battle of Sheriffmuir—­

    “By misfortune he happened to fa’, man;
      By saving his neck
      His trumpet did break,
    And came off without music at a’, man."[262]

J.B. corroborated my doubts by his raven-like croaking and criticising; but the good fellow writes me this morning that he is written down an ass, and that the approbation is unanimous.  It is but Edinburgh, to be sure; but Edinburgh has always been a harder critic than London.  It is a great mercy, and gives encouragement for future exertion.  Having written two leaves this morning, I think I will turn out to my walk, though two hours earlier than usual.  Egad, I could not persuade myself that it was such bad Balaam after all.

April 30.—­I corrected this morning a quantity of proofs and copy, and dawdled about a little, the weather of late becoming rather milder, though not much of that.  Methinks Duty looks as if she were but half-pleased with me; but would the Pagan bitch have me work on the Sunday?

FOOTNOTES: 

[234] Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, Act IV, Sc. 5.

[235] The reader will understand that the Novel was sold for behoof of James Ballantyne & Co.’s creditors, and that this sum includes the cost of printing the first edition as well as paper.—­J.G.L.

[236] Eident, i.e. eagerly diligent.—­J.G.L.

[237] These lines slightly altered from Logan.—­J.G.L.

[238] Lippened, i.e. relied upon.—­J.G.L.

[239] 2 King Henry VI., Act IV.  Sc. 10, slightly varied.

[240] In a letter of the same day he says—­“My interest, as you might have known, lies Windsor way.”—­J.G.L.

[241] William Coulter, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, died in office, April 1810, and was said to have been greatly consoled on his deathbed by the prospect of so grand a funeral as must needs occur in his case.—­Scott used to take him off as saying, at some public meeting, “Gentlemen, though doomed to the trade of a stocking-weaver, I was born with the soul of a Sheepio” (Scipio).