April 26.—­The snow still profusely distributed, and the surface, as our hair used to be in youth, after we had played at some active game, half black, half white, all in large patches.  I finished the criticism on Home, adding a string of Jacobite anecdotes, like that which boys put to a kite’s tail.  Sent off the packet to Lockhart; at the same time sent Croker a volume of French tracts, containing La Portefeuille de Bonaparte, which he wished to see.  Received a great cargo of papers from Bernadotte, some curious, and would have been inestimable two months back, but now my siege is almost made.  Still my feelings for poor Count Itterburg,[508] the lineal and legitimate, make me averse to have much to do with this child of the revolution.

April 27.—­This hand of mine gets to be like a kitten’s scratch, and will require much deciphering, or, what may be as well for the writer, cannot be deciphered at all.  I am sure I cannot read it myself.  Weather better, which is well, as I shall get a walk.  I have been a little nervous, having been confined to the house for three days.  Well, I may be disabled from duty, but my tamed spirits and sense of dejection have quelled all that freakishness of humour which made me a voluntary idler.  I present myself to the morning task, as the hack-horse patiently trudges to the pole of his chaise, and backs, however reluctantly, to have the traces fixed.  Such are the uses of adversity.

April 28.—­Wrought at continuing the Works, with some criticism on Defoe.[509] I have great aversion, I cannot tell why, to stuffing the “Border Antiquities” into what they call the Prose Works.

There is no encouragement, to be sure, for doing better, for nobody seems to care.  I cannot get an answer from J. Ballantyne, whether he thinks the review on the Highlands would be a better substitution.

April 29.—­Colonel and Captain Ferguson dined here with Mr. Laidlaw.  I wrote all the morning, then cut some wood.  I think the weather gets too warm for hard work with the axe, or I get too stiff and easily tired.

April 30.—­Went to Jedburgh to circuit, where found my old friend and schoolfellow, D. Monypenny.[510] Nothing to-day but a pack of riff-raff cases of petty larceny and trash.  Dined as usual with the Judge, and slept at my old friend Mr. Shortreed’s.

FOOTNOTES: 

[500] See Shenstone’s Pastoral Ballad, Part ii., Hope.

[501] The coach to Edinburgh.

[502] See “The Braes of Ballochmyle;” Currie’s Burns, vol. iv. p. 294.

[503] The conduct of the Quarterly at this time was in after years thus commented upon by John Wilson.

“North.—­While we were defending the principles of the British constitution, bearding its enemies, and administering to them the knout, the Quarterly Review was meek and mum as a mouse.