December 28.—­Somehow I think the attack on Christmas Day has been of a critical kind, and, having gone off so well, may be productive rather of health than continued indisposition.  If one is to get a renewal of health in his fifty-fourth year, he must look to pay fine for it.  Last night George Thomson[101] came to see how I was, poor fellow.  He has talent, is well informed, and has an excellent heart; but there is an eccentricity about him that defies description.  I wish to God I saw him provided in a country kirk.  That, with a rational wife—­that is, if there is such a thing to be gotten for him,—­would, I think, bring him to a steady temper.  At present he is between the tyning and the winning.  If I could get him to set to any hard study, he would do something clever.

How to make a critic.—­A sly rogue, sheltering himself under the generic name of Mr. Campbell, requested of me, through the penny-post, the loan of L50 for two years, having an impulse, as he said, to make this demand.  As I felt no corresponding impulse, I begged to decline a demand which might have been as reasonably made by any Campbell on earth; and another impulse has determined the man of fifty pounds to send me anonymous abuse of my works and temper and selfish disposition.  The severity of the joke lies in 14d. for postage, to avoid which his next epistle shall go back to the clerks of the Post Office, as not for S.W.S.  How the severe rogue would be disappointed, if he knew I never looked at more than the first and last lines of his satirical effusion!

When I first saw that a literary profession was to be my fate, I endeavoured by all efforts of stoicism to divest myself of that irritable degree of sensibility—­or, to speak plainly, of vanity—­which makes the poetical race miserable and ridiculous.  The anxiety of a poet for praise and for compliments I have always endeavoured [to keep down].

December 29.—­Base feelings this same calomel gives one—­mean, poor, and abject—­a wretch, as Will Rose says:—­

    “Fie, fie, on silly coward man,
    That he should be the slave o’t."[102]

Then it makes one “wofully dogged and snappish,” as Dr. Rutty, the Quaker, says in his Gurnal.[103]

Sent Lockhart four pages on Sheridan’s plays; not very good, I think, but the demand came sudden.  Must go to W——­k![104] yet am vexed by that humour of contradiction which makes me incline to do anything else in preference.  Commenced preface for new edition of my Novels.  The city of Cork send my freedom in a silver box.  I thought I was out of their grace for going to see Blarney rather than the Cove, for which I was attacked and defended in the papers when in Ireland.  I am sure they are so civil that I would have gone wherever they wished me to go if I had had any one to have told me what I ought to be most inquisitive about.

    “For if I should as lion come in strife
    Into such place, ’t were pity of my life."[105]