There must be difficulty in being always in the right humour to hold a court.  There are usurpers to be encountered, and insurrections to be put down, an incessant troop, bienseances to be discharged, a sort of etiquette which is the curse of all courts.  An old lion cannot get hamstrung quietly at four hundred miles distance, but the Empress must send him her condolence and a pot of lipsalve.  To be sure the monster is consanguinean, as Sir Toby says.[157]

Looked in at Constable’s coming home; Cadell emerged from Alsatia; borrowed Clarendon.  Home by half-past twelve.

My old friend Sir Peter Murray[158] called to offer his own assistance, Lord Justice-Clerk’s, and Abercromby’s, to negotiate for me a seat upon the Bench [of the Court of Session] instead of my Sheriffdom and Clerkship.  I explained to him the use which I could make of my pen was not, I thought, consistent with that situation; and that, besides, I had neglected the law too long to permit me to think of it; but this was kindly and honourably done.  I can see people think me much worse off than I think myself.  They may be right; but I will not be beat till I have tried a rally, and a bold one.

February 8.—­Slept ill, and rather bilious in the morning.  Many of the Bench now are my juniors.  I will not seek ex eleemosyna a place which, had I turned my studies that way, I might have aspired to long ago ex meritis.  My pen should do much better for me than the odd L1000 a year.  If it fails, I will lean on what they leave me.  Another chance might be, if it fails, in the patronage which might, after a year or two, place me in Exchequer.  But I do not count on this unless, indeed, the D[uke] of B[uccleuch], when he comes of age, should choose to make play.

Got to my work again, and wrote easier than the two last days.

Mr. Laidlaw[159] came in from Abbotsford and dined with us.  We spent the evening in laying down plans for the farm, and deciding whom we should keep and whom dismiss among the people.  This we did on the true negro-driving principle of self-interest, the only principle I know which never swerves from its objects.  We chose all the active, young, and powerful men, turning old age and infirmity adrift.  I cannot help this, for a guinea cannot do the work of five; but I will contrive to make it easier to the sufferers.

February 9.—­A stormy morning, lowering and blustering, like our fortunes. Mea virtute me involvo. But I must say to the Muse of fiction, as the Earl of Pembroke said to the ejected nuns of Wilton, “Go spin, you jades, go spin!” Perhaps she has no tow on her rock.[160] When I was at Kilkenny last year we went to see a nunnery, but could not converse with the sisters because they were in strict retreat.  I was delighted with the red-nosed Padre, who showed us the place with a sort of proud, unctuous humiliation, and apparent dereliction of the world, that had to me the air of