January 30.—­False delicacy.  Mr. Gibson, Mr. Cowan, Mr. J.B., were with me last night to talk over important matters, and suggest an individual for a certain highly confidential situation.  I was led to mention a person of whom I knew nothing but that he was an honest and intelligent man.  All seemed to acquiesce, and agreed to move the thing to the party concerned this morning, and so Mr. G. and Mr. C. left me, when J.B. let out that it was their unanimous opinion that we should be in great trouble were the individual appointed, from faults of temper, etc., which would make it difficult to get on with him.  With a hearty curse I hurried J.B. to let them know that I had no partiality for the man whatever, and only named him because he had been proposed for a similar situation elsewhere.  This is provoking enough, that they would let me embarrass my affairs with a bad man (an unfit one, I mean) rather than contradict me.  I dare say great men are often used so.

I laboured freely yesterday.  The stream rose fast—­if clearly, is another question; but there is bulk for it, at least—­about thirty printed pages.

    “And now again, boys, to the oar.”

January 31.—­There being nothing in the roll to-day, I stay at home from the Court, and add another day’s perfect labour to Woodstock, which is worth five days of snatched intervals, when the current of thought and invention is broken in upon, and the mind shaken and diverted from its purpose by a succession of petty interruptions.  I have now no pecuniary provisions to embarrass me, and I think, now the shock of the discovery is past and over, I am much better off on the whole; I am as if I had shaken off from my shoulders a great mass of garments, rich, indeed, but cumbrous, and always more a burden than a comfort.  I am free of an hundred petty public duties imposed on me as a man of consideration—­of the expense of a great hospitality—­and, what is better, of the great waste of time connected with it.  I have known, in my day, all kinds of society, and can pretty well estimate how much or how little one loses by retiring from all but that which is very intimate.  I sleep and eat, and work as I was wont; and if I could see those about me as indifferent to the loss of rank as I am, I should be completely happy.  As it is, Time must salve that sore, and to Time I trust it.

Since the 14th of this month no guest has broken bread in my house save G.H.  Gordon[142] one morning at breakfast.  This happened never before since I had a house of my own.  But I have played Abou Hassan long enough; and if the Caliph came I would turn him back again.

FOOTNOTES: 

[107] The parsimonious yet liberal London merchant, whose miserly habits gave Arbuthnot the materials of the story.  See Professor Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol i. p. 244, and Martin Scriblerns, cap. xii., Pope, vol. iv. p. 54, Edin. 1776.