ng. I was hungry; eat and drank and became drowsy; then I took to
arranging the old plays, of which Terry had brought me about a dozen,
and dipping into them scrambled through two. One, called _Michaelmas
Term_,[307] full of traits of manners; and another a sort of bouncing
tragedy, called the _Hector of Germany, or the Palsgrave_.[308] The
last, worthless in the extreme, is, like many of the plays in the
beginning of the seventeenth century, written to a good tune. The
dramatic poets of that time seem to have possessed as joint-stock a
highly poetical and abstract tone of language, so that the worst of them
often remind you of the very best. The audience must have had a much
stronger sense of poetry in those days than now, since language was
received and applauded at the Fortune or at the Red Bull,[309] which
could not now be understood by any general audience in Great Britain.
This leads far.

This morning I wrote two hours, then out with Tom Purdie, and gave
directions about thinning all the plantations above Abbotsford properly
so called. Came in at one o'clock and now set to work. _Debout, debout,
Lyciscas, debout._[310] Finished four leaves.

_August_ 2.--Well; and to-day I finished before dinner five leaves more,
and I would crow a little about it, but here comes Duty like an old
housekeeper to an idle chambermaid. Hear her very words:--

DUTY.--Oh! you crow, do you? Pray, can you deny that your sitting so
quiet at work was owing to its raining heavily all the forenoon, and
indeed till dinner-time, so that nothing would have stirred out that
could help it, save a duck or a goose? I trow, if it had been a fine
day, by noon there would have been aching of the head, throbbing,
shaking, and so forth, to make an apology for going out.

EGOMET IPSE.--And whose head ever throbbed to go out when it rained,
Mrs. Duty?

DUTY.--_Answer not to me with a fool-born jest_, as your poor friend
Erskine used to say to you when you escaped from his good advice under
the fire of some silly pun. You smoke a cigar after dinner, and I never
check you--drink tea, too, which is loss of time; and then, instead of
writing me one other page, or correcting those you have written out, you
rollick into the woods till you have not a dry thread about you; and
here you sit writing down my words in your foolish journal instead of
minding my advice.

EGO.--Why, Mrs. Duty, I would as gladly be friends with [you] as
Crabbe's[311] tradesman fel