Mr. Laidlaw dined with us.  Says Mr. Gibson told him he would dispose of my affairs, were it any but S.W.S.[162] No doubt, so should I, and am wellnigh doing so at any rate.  But, fortuna juvante! much may be achieved.  At worst, the prospect is not very discouraging to one who wants little.  Methinks I have been like Burns’s poor labourer,

    “So constantly in Ruin’s sight,
    The view o’t gives me little fright.”

[Edinburgh,] February 10.—­Went through, for a new day, the task of buttoning, which seems to me somehow to fill up more of my morning than usual—­not, certainly, that such is really the case, but that my mind attends to the process, having so little left to hope or fear.  The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention.[163] When I get over any knotty difficulty in a story, or have had in former times to fill up a passage in a poem, it was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.  This is so much the case that I am in the habit of relying upon it, and saying to myself, when I am at a loss, “Never mind, we shall have it at seven o’clock to-morrow morning.”  If I have forgot a circumstance, or a name, or a copy of verses, it is the same thing.  There is a passage about this sort of matutinal inspiration in the Odyssey,[164] which would make a handsome figure here if I could read or write Greek.  I will look into Pope for it, who, ten to one, will not tell me the real translation.  I think the first hour of the morning is also favourable to the bodily strength.  Among other feats, when I was a young man, I was able at times to lift a smith’s anvil with one hand, by what is called the horn, or projecting piece of iron on which things are beaten to turn them round.  But I could only do this before breakfast, and shortly after rising.  It required my full strength, undiminished by the least exertion, and those who choose to try it will find the feat no easy one.  This morning I had some good ideas respecting Woodstock which will make the story better.  The devil of a difficulty is, that one puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have raised.  A letter from Sir James Mackintosh of condolence, prettily expressed, and which may be sung to the old tune of “Welcome, welcome, brother Debtor.”  A brother son of chivalry dismounted by mischance is sure to excite the compassion of one laid on the arena before him.

Yesterday I had an anecdote from old Sir James Steuart Denham,[165] which is worth writing down.  His uncle, Lord Elcho, was, as is well known, engaged in the affair of 1745.  He was dissatisfied with the conduct of matters from beginning to end.  But after the left wing of the Highlanders was repulsed and broken at Culloden, Elcho rode up to the Chevalier and told him all was lost, and that nothing remained