“They cut his throat from ear to ear,
  His brains they battered in;
  His name was Mr. William Weare,
  He dwelt in Lyon’s Inn.”

—­J.G.L.

[304] Dr. John Jamieson, formerly minister to a Secession congregation in Forfar, removed to a like charge in Edinburgh in 1795, where he officiated for forty-three years; he died in his house in 4 George Square in 1838, aged seventy-nine.

[305] This novel was passing through the press in 8vo, 12mo, and 18mo, to complete collective editions in these sizes.—­J.G.I.

[306] Afterwards Sir David Brewster.  He died at Allerley House on the Tweed, aged eighty-seven, on February 10, 1868.

AUGUST.

August 1.—­Yesterday evening did nothing for the idlesse of the morning.  I was hungry; eat and drank and became drowsy; then I took to arranging the old plays, of which Terry had brought me about a dozen, and dipping into them scrambled through two.  One, called Michaelmas Term,[307] full of traits of manners; and another a sort of bouncing tragedy, called the Hector of Germany, or the Palsgrave.[308] The last, worthless in the extreme, is, like many of the plays in the beginning of the seventeenth century, written to a good tune.  The dramatic poets of that time seem to have possessed as joint-stock a highly poetical and abstract tone of language, so that the worst of them often remind you of the very best.  The audience must have had a much stronger sense of poetry in those days than now, since language was received and applauded at the Fortune or at the Red Bull,[309] which could not now be understood by any general audience in Great Britain.  This leads far.

This morning I wrote two hours, then out with Tom Purdie, and gave directions about thinning all the plantations above Abbotsford properly so called.  Came in at one o’clock and now set to work. Debout, debout, Lyciscas, debout.[310] Finished four leaves.

August 2.—­Well; and to-day I finished before dinner five leaves more, and I would crow a little about it, but here comes Duty like an old housekeeper to an idle chambermaid.  Hear her very words:—­

DUTY.—­Oh! you crow, do you?  Pray, can you deny that your sitting so quiet at work was owing to its raining heavily all the forenoon, and indeed till dinner-time, so that nothing would have stirred out that could help it, save a duck or a goose?  I trow, if it had been a fine day, by noon there would have been aching of the head, throbbing, shaking, and so forth, to make an apology for going out.

EGOMET IPSE.—­And whose head ever throbbed to go out when it rained, Mrs. Duty?

DUTY.—­Answer not to me with a fool-born jest, as your poor friend Erskine used to say to you when you escaped from his good advice under the fire of some silly pun.  You smoke a cigar after dinner, and I never check you—­drink tea, too, which is loss of time; and then, instead of writing me one other page, or correcting those you have written out, you rollick into the woods till you have not a dry thread about you; and here you sit writing down my words in your foolish journal instead of minding my advice.