or getting loans from some grudging friend who can never look at you after but with fear of losing his cash, or you at him without the humiliating sense of having extorted an obligation.  Besides my large debts, I have paid since I was in trouble at least L2000 of personal encumbrances, so no wonder my nose is still under water.  I really believe the sense of this apparently unending struggle, schemes for retrenchment in which I was unseconded, made me low-spirited, for the sun seems to shine brighter upon me as a free man.  Nevertheless, devil take the necessity which makes me drudge like a very hack of Grub Street.

    “May the foul fa’ the gear and the bletherie o ’t."[299]

I walked out with Tom’s assistance, came home, went through the weary work of cramming, and so forth; wrought after tea, and then to bed.

April 20.—­As yesterday till two—­sixteen pages of the History written, and not less than one-fifth of the whole book.  What if they should be off?  I were finely holp’d for throwing my time away.  A toy!  They dare not.

Lord Buchan is dead, a person whose immense vanity, bordering upon insanity, obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talents.  His imagination was so fertile that he seemed really to believe the extraordinary fictions which he delighted in telling.  His economy, most laudable in the early part of his life, when it enabled him, from a small income, to pay his father’s debts, became a miserable habit, and led him to do mean things.  He had a desire to be a great man, and a Maecenas bon marche.  The two celebrated lawyers, his brothers, were not more gifted by nature than I think he was, but the restraints of a profession kept the eccentricity of the family in order.  Henry Erskine was the best-natured man I ever knew, thoroughly a gentleman, and with but one fault:  he could not say no, and thus sometimes misled those who trusted him.  Tom Erskine was positively mad.  I have heard him tell a cock-and-a-bull story of having seen the ghost of his father’s servant, John Burnet, with as much sincerity as if he believed every word he was saying.  Both Henry and Thomas were saving men, yet both died very poor.  The one at one time possessed L200,000; the other had a considerable fortune.  The Earl alone has died wealthy.  It is saving, not getting, that is the mother of riches.  They all had wit.  The Earl’s was crack-brained and sometimes caustic; Henry’s was of the very kindest, best-humoured, and gayest that ever cheered society; that of Lord Erskine was moody and maddish.  But I never saw him in his best days.

Went to Haining.  Time has at last touched the beautiful Mrs. Pringle.  I wonder he was not ashamed of himself for spoiling so fine a form.  But what cares he?  Corrected proofs after dinner.  James B. is at last at work again.

April 21.—­Spent the whole morning at writing, still the History, such is my wilful whim.  Twenty pages now finished—­I suppose the clear fourth part of a volume.  I went out, but the day being sulky I sat in the Conservatory, after trying a walk!  I have been glancing over the works for Gillies’s review, and I think on them between-hands while I compose the History,—­an odd habit of doing two things at once, but it has always answered with me well enough.