ke being in the habit of showing
feats of strength, which you at length gain praise by accomplishing,
while some shame occurs in failure.

_March_ 25.--The end winds out well enough. I have almost finished
to-night; indeed I might have done so had I been inclined, but I had a
walk in a hurricane of snow for two hours and feel a little tired. Miss
Margaret Ferguson came to dinner with us.[230]

_March_ 26.--Here is a disagreeable morning, snowing and hailing, with
gleams of bright sunshine between, and all the ground white, and all the
air frozen. I don't like this jumbling of weather. It is ungenial, and
gives chilblains. Besides, with its whiteness, and its coldness, and its
glister, and its discomfort, it resembles that most disagreeable of all
things, a vain, cold, empty, beautiful woman, who has neither mind nor
heart, but only features like a doll. I do not know what is so like this
disagreeable day, when the sun is so bright, and yet so uninfluential,
that

"One may gaze upon its beams
Till he is starved with cold."

No matter, it will serve as well as another day to finish _Woodstock_.
Walked out to the lake, and coquetted with this disagreeable weather,
whereby I catch chilblains in my fingers and cold in my head. Fed the
swans.

Finished _Woodstock_, however, _cum tota sequela_ of title-page,
introduction, etc., and so, as Dame Fortune says in _Quevedo_,

"Go wheel, and may the devil drive thee."[231]

_March_ 27.--Another bright cold day. I answered two modest requests
from widow ladies. One, whom I had already assisted in some law
business, on the footing of her having visited my mother, requested me
to write to Mr. Peel, saying, on her authority, that her second son, a
youth of infinite merit and accomplishment, was fit for any situation in
a public office, and that I requested he might be provided accordingly.
Another widowed dame, whose claim is having read _Marmion_ and the _Lady
of the Lake_, besides a promise to read all my other works--Gad, it is a
rash engagement!--demands that I shall either pay L200 to get her cub
into some place or other, or settle him in a seminary of education.
Really this is very much after the fashion of the husbandman of Miguel
Turra's requests of Sancho when Governor.[232] "Have you anything else
to ask, honest man?" quoth Sancho. But what are the demands of an honest
man to those of an honest woman, and she a widow to boot? I do believe
your destitute