a free liver.  But my father, the most abstemious of men, save when the duties of hospitality required him to be very moderately free with his bottle, and that was very seldom, had the same weakness which now annoys me, and he, I think, was not above seventy when cut off.  Square the odds, and good-night Sir Walter about sixty.  I care not, if I leave my name unstained, and my family properly settled. Sat est vixisse.

December 8.—­Talking of the vixisse, it may not be impertinent to notice that Knox, a young poet of considerable talent, died here a week or two since.  His father was a respectable yeoman, and he himself, succeeding to good farms under the Duke of Buccleuch, became too soon his own master, and plunged into dissipation and ruin.  His poetical talent, a very fine one, then showed itself in a fine strain of pensive poetry, called, I think, The Lonely Hearth, far superior to those of Michael Bruce, whose consumption, by the way, has been the life of his verses.  But poetry, nay, good poetry, is a drug in the present day.  I am a wretched patron.  I cannot go with a subscription-paper, like a pocket-pistol about me, and draw unawares on some honest country-gentleman, who has as much alarm as if I had used the phrase “stand and deliver,” and parts with his money with a grimace, indicating some suspicion that the crown-piece thus levied goes ultimately into the collector’s own pocket.  This I see daily done; and I have seen such collectors, when they have exhausted Papa and Mamma, continue their trade among the misses, and conjure out of their pockets those little funds which should carry them to a play or an assembly.  It is well people will go through this—­it does some good, I suppose, and they have great merit who can sacrifice their pride so far as to attempt it in this way.  For my part I am a bad promoter of subscriptions; but I wished to do what I could for this lad, whose talent I really admired; and I am not addicted to admire heaven-born poets, or poetry that is reckoned very good considering.  I had him, Knox,[60] at Abbotsford, about ten years ago, but found him unfit for that sort of society.  I tried to help him, but there were temptations he could never resist.  He scrambled on, writing for the booksellers and magazines, and living like the Otways, and Savages, and Chattertons of former days, though I do not know that he was in actual want.  His connection with me terminated in begging a subscription or a guinea now and then.  His last works were spiritual hymns, and which he wrote very well.  In his own line of society he was said to exhibit infinite humour; but all his works are grave and pensive, a style perhaps, like Master Stephen’s melancholy,[61] affected for the nonce.

Mrs. G[rant] of L. intimates that she will take her pudding—­her pension, I mean (see 30th November), and is contrite, as H[enry] M[ackenzie] vouches.  I am glad the stout old girl is not foreclosed; faith, cabbing a pension in these times is like hunting a pig with a soap’d tail, monstrous apt to slip through your fingers.[62] Dined at home with Lady S. and Anne.