The Misses Kerr left us on Friday—­two charming young persons, well-looked, well-mannered, and well-born; above all, well-principled.  They sing together in a very delightful manner, and our evenings are the duller without them.

I am annoyed beyond measure with the idle intrusion of voluntary correspondents; each man who has a pen, ink, and sheet of foolscap to spare, flies a letter at me.  I believe the postage costs me L100 [a year], besides innumerable franks; and all the letters regard the writer’s own hopes or projects, or are filled with unasked advice or extravagant requests.  I think this evil increases rather than diminishes.  On the other hand, I must fairly own that I have received many communications in this way worth all the trouble and expense that the others cost me, so I must “lay the head of the sow to the tail of the grice,” as the proverb elegantly expresses itself.

News again of Sophia and baby.  Mrs. Hughes thinks the infant a beauty.  Johnnie opines that it is not very pretty, and grandpapa supposes it to be like other new-born children, which are as like as a basket of oranges.

January 7.—­Wrought at the review, and finished a good lot of it.  Mr. Stewart left us, amply provided with the history of Abbotsford and its contents.  It is a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure, and I have great pleasure in it, for while it pleases a fantastic person in the style and manner of its architecture and decoration, it has all the comforts of a commodious habitation.

Besides the review, I have been for this week busily employed in revising for the press the Tales of a Grandfather.  Cadell rather wished to rush it out by employing three different presses, but this I repressed (smoke the pun!).  I will not have poor James Ballantyne driven off the plank to which we are all three clinging.[110] I have made great additions to volume first, and several of these Tales; and I care not who knows it, I think well of them.  Nay, I will hash history with anybody, be he who he will.[111] I do not know but it would be wise to let romantic composition rest, and turn my mind to the history of England, France, and Ireland, to be da capo rota’d, as well as that of Scotland.  Men would laugh at me as an author for Mr. Newbery’s shop in Paul’s Churchyard.  I should care little for that. Virginibus puerisque. I would as soon compose histories for boys and girls, which may be useful, as fictions for children of a larger growth, which can at best be only idle folk’s entertainment.  But write what I will, or to whom I will, I am doggedly determined to write myself out of the present scrape by any labour that is fair and honest.

January 8.—­Despatched my review (in part), and in the morning walked from Chiefswood, all about the shearing flats, and home by the new walk, which I have called the Bride’s Walk, because Jane was nearly stuck fast in the bog there, just after her marriage, in the beginning of 1825.