March 27.—­Letters again.  Let me see.  I wrote to Lord Montagu about Scott of Beirlaw’s commission, in which Invernahyle interests himself.  Item, to a lady who is pestering me about a Miss Campbell sentenced to transportation for stealing a silver spoon.  Item, to John Eckford.  Item, to James Loch, to get an appointment for Sandie Ballantyne’s son.  Not one, as Dangle says,[280] about any business of my own.  My correspondence is on a most disinterested footing.  This lasts till past eleven, then enters my cousin R., and remains for two hours, till politics, family news, talk of the neighbourhood are all exhausted, and two or three reputations torn to pieces in the scouring of them.  At length I walk him out about a mile, and come back from that empechement.  But it is only to find Mr. [Henry] C[ranstoun],[281] my neighbour, in the parlour with the girls, and there is another sederunt of an hour.  Well, such things must be, and our friends mean them as civility, and we must take and give the currency of the country.  But I am diddled out of a day all the same.  The ladies came from Huntly Burn, and cut off the evening.[282]

March 28.—­In spite of the temptation of a fine morning, I toiled manfully at the review till two o’clock, commencing at seven.  I fear it will be uninteresting, but I like the muddling work of antiquities, and, besides, wish to record my sentiments with regard to the Gothic question.  No one that has not laboured as I have done on imaginary topics can judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave and dull.  I dare say, when the clown of the pantomime escapes from his nightly task of vivacity, it is his special comfort to smoke a pipe and be prosy with some good-natured fellow, the dullest of his acquaintance.  I have seen such a tendency in Sir Adam Ferguson, the gayest man I ever knew; and poor Tom Sheridan has complained to me of the fatigue of supporting the character of an agreeable companion.

March 29.—­I wrote, read, and walked with the most stoical regularity.  This muddling among old books has the quality of a sedative, and saves the tear and wear of an overwrought brain.  I wandered on the hills pleasantly enough and concluded a pleasant and laborious day.

March 30.—­I finished the remainder of the criticism and sent it off.  Pray Heaven it break not the mail coach down.

Lord and Lady Dalhousie, and their relation, Miss Hawthorne, came to dinner, to meet whom we had Dr. and Mrs. Brewster.  Lord Dalhousie has more of the Caledonian prisca fides than any man I know now alive.  He has served his country in all quarters of the world and in every climate; yet, though my contemporary, looks ten years my junior.  He laughed at the idea of rigid temperance, and held an occasional skirmish no bad thing even in the West Indies, thinking, perhaps, with Armstrong, of “the rare debauch"[283].  In all incidents of life he has been the same steady,