December 9.—­Yesterday I read and wrote the whole day and evening.  To-day I shall not be so happy.  Having Gas-Light Company to attend at two, I must be brief in journalising.

The gay world has been kept in hot water lately by the impudent publication of the celebrated Harriet Wilson, ——­ from earliest possibility, I suppose, who lived with half the gay world at hack and manger, and now obliges such as will not pay hush-money with a history of whatever she knows or can invent about them.  She must have been assisted in the style, spelling, and diction, though the attempt at wit is very poor, that at pathos sickening.  But there is some good retailing of conversations, in which the style of the speakers, so far as known to me, is exactly imitated, and some things told, as said by individuals of each other, which will sound unpleasantly in each other’s ears.  I admire the address of Lord A——­y, himself very severely handled from time to time.  Some one asked him if H.W. had been pretty correct on the whole.  “Why, faith,” he replied, “I believe so”—­when, raising his eyes, he saw Quentin Dick, whom the little jilt had treated atrociously—­“what concerns the present company always excepted, you know,” added Lord A——­y, with infinite presence of mind.  As he was in pari casu with Q.D. no more could be said.  After all, H.W. beats Con Philips, Anne Bellamy, and all former demireps out and out.  I think I supped once in her company, more than twenty years since, at Mat Lewis’s in Argyle Street, where the company, as the Duke says to Lucio, chanced to be “fairer than honest."[63] She was far from beautiful, if it be the same chiffonne, but a smart saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and the manners of a wild schoolboy.  I am glad this accidental meeting has escaped her memory—­or, perhaps, is not accurately recorded in mine—­for, being a sort of French falconer, who hawk at all they see, I might have had a distinction which I am far from desiring.

Dined at Sir John Hay’s—­a large party; Skenes there, the Newenhams and others, strangers.  In the morning a meeting of Oil Gas Committee.  The concern lingers a little;

    “It may do weel, for ought it’s done yet,
    But only—­it’s no just begun yet."[64]

December 10.—­A stormy and rainy day.  Walked from the Court through the rain.  I don’t dislike this.  Egad, I rather like it; for no man that ever stepped on heather has less dread than I of catch-cold; and I seem to regain, in buffeting with the wind, a little of the high spirit with which, in younger days, I used to enjoy a Tam-o’-Shanter ride through darkness, wind, and rain,—­the boughs groaning and cracking over my head, the good horse free to the road and impatient for home, and feeling the weather as little as I did.

    “The storm around might roar and rustle,
    We didna mind the storm a whistle.”