f
nerves, for which God be humbly thanked. My spirits are neither low nor
high--grave, I think, and quiet--a complete twilight of the mind.

Good news of John Lockhart from Lady Montagu, who most kindly wrote on
that interesting topic.

I wrote five pages, nearly a double task, yet wandered for three hours,
axe in hand, superintending the thinning of the home planting. That does
good too. I feel it give steadiness to my mind. Women, it is said, go
mad much seldomer than men. I fancy, if this be true, it is in some
degree owing to the little manual works in which they are constantly
employed, which regulate in some degree the current of ideas, as the
pendulum regulates the motion of the timepiece. I do not know if this is
sense or nonsense, but I am sensible that if I were in solitary
confinement, without either the power of taking exercise or employing
myself in study, six months would make me a madman or an idiot.

_September_ 30.--Wrote four pages. Honest James Ballantyne came about
five. I had been cutting wood for two hours. He brought his child, a
remarkably fine boy, well-bred, quiet, and amiable. James and I had a
good comfortable chat, the boys being at Gattonside House. I am glad to
see him bear up against misfortune like a man. "Bread we shall eat, or
white or brown," that's the moral of it, Master Muggins.

FOOTNOTES:

[333] Sir Thomas Brisbane, who had formerly commanded a brigade in the
Peninsula. In 1832 he succeeded Sir Walter Scott as President of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh. Sir Thomas had married in 1819 a daughter of
Sir Henry Hay Makdougall of Makerstoun, Bart. Sir Thomas died at
Brisbane House, Ayrshire, in January 1860, in the eighty-seventh year of
his age.

[334] For an account of this family see _The Swintons of that Ilk and
their Cadets_, 4to, 1883, a privately printed volume by A.C. Swinton of
Kimmerghame. In a letter to his friend Swinton in 1814, Scott says that
he had been reading the family pedigree "to my exceeding refreshment."

[335] One of the Abbotsford labourers.

[336] _2 Henry IV_. Act IV. Sc. 2.

[337] Mr. E.W. Auriol Drummond Hay, heir-presumptive at one time of Lord
Kinnoul, was then residing in Edinburgh, owing to his official duties in
the Lyon Office; he took a great interest in archaeological matters, and
was for two years Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries before his
departure as Consul General to the Barbary States. He died at Tangier on
the 1st March 18