Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul, Rob Burns!  When I want to express a sentiment which I feel strongly, I find the phrase in Shakespeare—­or thee.  The blockheads talk of my being like Shakespeare—­not fit to tie his brogues.[426]

December 12.—­Did not go to the Parliament House, but drove with Walter to Dalkeith, where we missed the Duke, and found Mr. Blakeney.  One thing I saw there which pleased me much, and that was my own picture, painted twenty years ago by Raeburn for Constable, and which was to have been brought to sale among the rest of the wreck, hanging quietly up in the dining-room at Dalkeith.[427] I do not care much about these things, yet it would have been annoying to have been knocked down to the best bidder even in effigy; and I am obliged to the friendship and delicacy which placed the portrait where it now is.  Dined at Archie Swinton’s, with all the cousins of that honest clan, and met Lord Cringletie,[428] his wife, and others.  Finished my task this day.

December 13.—­Went to the Court this morning early, and remained till past three.  Then attended a meeting of the Edinburgh Academy Directors on account of some discussion about flogging.  I am an enemy to corporal punishment, but there are many boys who will not attend without it.  It is an instant and irresistible motive, and I love boys’ heads too much to spoil them at the expense of their opposite extremity.  Then, when children feel an emancipation on this point, we may justly fear they will loosen the bonds of discipline altogether.  The master, I fear, must be something of a despot at the risk of his becoming something like a tyrant.  He governs subjects whose keen sense of the present is not easily ruled by any considerations that are not pressing and immediate.  I was indifferently well beaten at school; but I am now quite certain that twice as much discipline would have been well bestowed.

Dined at home with Walter and Jane; they with Anne went out in the evening, I remained, but not I fear to work much.  I feel sorely fagged.  I am sadly fagged.  Then I cannot get ——­’s fate out of my head.  I see that kind, social, beneficent face never turned to me without respect and complacence, and—­I see it in the agonies of death.  This is childish; I tell myself so, and I trust the feeling to no one else.  But here it goes down like the murderer who could not cease painting the ideal vision of the man he had murdered, and who he supposed haunted him.  A thousand fearful images and dire suggestions glance along the mind when it is moody and discontented with itself.  Command them to stand and show themselves, and you presently assert the power of reason over imagination.  But if by any strange alterations in one’s nervous system you lost for a moment the talisman which controls these fiends, would they not terrify into obedience with their mandates, rather than we would dare longer to endure their presence?