and talks of 25,000.  This allows a profit of L50 per thousand copies, not much worse than the larger copy, and Cadell thinks to carry on both.  I doubt this.  I have great apprehension that these interlopers would disgust the regular trade, with whom we are already deeply engaged.  I also foresee selling the worst copies at the higher price.  All this must be thought and cared for.  In the meantime, I see a fund, from which large payments may be made to the Trustees, capable of extinguishing the debt, large as it is, in ten years or earlier, and leaving a reversion to my family of the copyrights.  Sweet bodements[316]—­good—­but we must not reckon our chickens before they are hatched, though they are chipping the shell now.  We will see how the stream takes.

Dined at a public dinner given to the excellent Lord Dalhousie before his departure for India.  An odd way of testifying respect to public characters, by eating, drinking, and roaring.  The names, however, will make a good show in the papers.  Home at ten.  Good news from Sophia and Walter.  I am zealous for the Mediterranean when the season comes, which may be the beginning of September.

May 21.—­This is only the 23d on which I write, yet I have forgotten anything that has passed on the 21st worthy of note.  I wrote a good deal, I know, and dined at home.  The step of time is noiseless as it passes over an old man.  The non est tanti mingles itself with everything.

May 22.—­I was detained long in the Court, though Ham. had returned to his labour.  We dined with Captain Basil Hall, and met a Mr. Codman, or some such name, with his lady from Boston.  The last a pleasant and well-mannered woman, the husband Bostonian enough.  We had Sir William Arbuthnot, besides, and his lady.

By-the-bye, I should have remembered that I called on my old friend, Lady Charlotte Campbell, and found her in her usual good-humour, though miffed a little—­I suspect at the history of Gillespie Grumach in the Legend of Montrose.  I saw Haining also, looking thin and pale.  These should have gone to the memorandum of yesterday.

May 23.—­Went to-day to call on the Commissioner,[317] and saw, at his Grace’s Levee, the celebrated divine, soi-disant prophet, Irving.[318] He is a fine-looking man (bating a diabolical squint), with talent on his brow and madness in his eye.  His dress, and the arrangement of his hair, indicated that much attention had been bestowed on his externals, and led me to suspect a degree of self-conceit, consistent both with genius and insanity.

Came home by Cadell’s, who persists in his visions of El Dorado.  He insists that I will probably bring L60,000 within six years to rub off all Constable’s debts, which that sum will do with a vengeance.  Cadell talks of offering for the Poetry to Longman.  I fear they will not listen to him.  The Napoleon he can command when he likes by purchasing their stock in hand.  The Lives of the Novelists may also be had.  Pleasant schemes all these, but dangerous to build upon.  Yet in looking at the powerful machine which we have put in motion, it must be owned “as broken ships have come to land.”