September 14.—­In the morning wrote my answer to Gourgaud, rather too keen perhaps, but I owe him nothing; and as for exciting his resentment, I will neither seek nor avoid it.

Cadell’s views seem fair, and he is open and explicit.  His brothers support him, and he has no want of cash.  He sells two or three copies of Bonaparte and one of the novels, or two, almost every day.  He must soon, he says, apply to London for copies.  Read a Refutation, as it calls itself, of Napoleon’s history.  It is so very polite and accommodating that every third word is a concession—­the work of a man able to judge distinctly on specific facts, but erroneous in his general results.  He will say the same of me, perhaps.  Ballantyne and Cadell leave us.  Enter Miss Sinclairs, two in number, also a translator, and a little Flemish woman, his wife—­very good-humoured, rather a little given to compliment; name Fauconpret.  They are to return at night in a gig as far as Kelso—­a bold undertaking.

September 16.—­The ladies went to Church; I, God forgive me, finished the Chronicles[41] with a good deal of assistance from Colonel Ferguson’s notes about Indian affairs.  The patch is, I suspect, too glaring to be pleasing; but the Colonel’s sketches are capitally good.  I understand, too, there are one or two East Indian novels which have lately appeared.  Naboclish! vogue la galere!

September 17.—­Received from James B. the proofs of my reply to General Gourgaud, with some cautious balaam from mine honest friend, alarmed by a Highland Colonel, who had described Gourgaud as a mauvais garcon, famous fencer, marksman, and so forth.  I wrote in answer, which is true, that I would hope all my friends would trust to my acting with proper caution and advice; but that if I were capable, in a moment of weakness, of doing anything short of what my honour demanded, I would die the death of a poisoned rat in hole, out of mere sense of my own degradation.  God knows, that, though life is placid enough with me, I do not feel anything to attach me to it so strongly as to occasion my avoiding any risk which duty to my character may demand from me.

I set to work with the Tales of a Grandfather, second volume, and finished four pages.

September 18.—­Wrote five pages of the Tales.  Walked from Huntly Burn, having gone in the carriage.  Smoked my cigar with Lockhart after dinner, and then whiled away the evening over one of Miss Austen’s novels.  There is a truth of painting in her writings which always delights me.  They do not, it is true, get above the middle classes of society, but there she is inimitable.

September 19.—­Wrote three pages, but dawdled a good deal; yet the Tales get on, although I feel bilious, and vapourish, I believe I must call it.  At such times my loneliness, and the increasing inability to walk, come dark over me, but surely these mulligrubs belong to the mind more than the body.