A great deal of worry in the Court to-day, and I lost my spectacles, and was a dark and perplexed man—­found them again though.  Wrote to Lockhart and to Charles, and will do more if I can, but am sadly done up.  An old friend came and pressed unmercifully some selfish request of his own to ask somebody to do something for his son.  I shall be glad to be at Abbotsford to get rid of this town, where I have not, in the proper and social sense of the word, a single friend whose company pleases me.  In the country I have always Tom Purdie.

Dined at the Lord Chief Commissioner’s, where I met, the first time for thirty years, my old friend and boon companion, with whom I shared the wars of Bacchus, Venus, and sometimes of Mars.  The past rushed on me like a flood and almost brought tears into my eyes.  It is no very laudable exploit to record, but I once drank three bottles of wine with this same rogue—­Sir William Forbes and Sir Alexander Wood being of the party.  David Erskine of Cardross keeps his looks better than most of our contemporaries.  I hope we shall meet for a longer time.

March 5.—­I corrected sheets, and, being a Teind Wednesday, began the second volume and proceeded as far as page fourth.

We dined at Hector Macdonald’s with several Highlanders, most of whom were in their garb, intending to go to a great fancy ball in the evening.  There were young Cluny Macpherson, Campbell Airds, Campbell Saddell, and others of the race of Diarmid.  I went for an hour to the ball, where there were many gay and some grotesque figures.  A dressed ball is, for the first half-hour, a splendid spectacle; you see youth and beauty dressed in their gayest attire, unlimited, save by their own taste, and enjoying the conscious power of charming, which gives such life and alacrity to the features.  But the charm ceases in this like everything else.  The want of masks takes away the audacity with which the disguised parties conduct themselves at a masquerade, and [leaves] the sullen sheepishness which makes them, I suppose, the worst maskers in Europe.  At the only real masquerade which I have known in Edinburgh there were many, if not most, of those who had determined to sustain characters, who had more ill-breeding than facetiousness.  The jests were chiefly calculated to give pain, and two or three quarrels were with difficulty prevented from ripening into duels.  A fancy ball has no offence in it, therefore cannot be wrecked on this rock.  But, on the other hand, it is horribly dull work when the first coup d’oeil is over.

There were some good figures, and some grossly absurd.  A very gay cavalier with a broad bright battle-axe was pointed out to me as an eminent distiller, and another knight in the black coarse armour of a cuirassier of the 17th century stalked about as if he thought himself the very mirror of chivalry.  He was the son of a celebrated upholsterer, so might claim the broad axe from more titles than one.  There was some good dancing; Cluny Macpherson footed it gallantly.