question, what we are to be. But there is a God, and a just God--a
judgment and a future life--and all who own so much let them act
according to the faith that is in them. I would [not], of course, limit
the range of my genii to this confined earth. There is the universe,
with all its endless extent of worlds.

Company at home--Sir Adam Ferguson and his Lady; Colonel and Miss
Russell; Count Davidoff, and Mr. Collyer. By the by, I observe that all
men whose names are obviously derived from some mechanical trade,
endeavour to disguise and antiquate, as it were, their names, by
spelling them after some quaint manner or other. Thus we have Collyer,
Smythe, Tailleure; as much as to say, My ancestor was indeed a mechanic,
but it was a world of time ago, when the word was spelled very
[differently]. Then we had young Whytbank and Will Allan the artist[67],
a very agreeable, simple-mannered, and pleasant man.

_December_ 11.--A touch of the _morbus eruditorum_, to which I am as
little subject as most folks, and have it less now than when young. It
is a tremor of the heart, the pulsation of which becomes painfully
sensible--a disposition to causeless alarm--much lassitude--and decay of
vigour of mind and activity of intellect. The reins feel weary and
painful, and the mind is apt to receive and encourage gloomy
apprehensions and causeless fears. Fighting with this fiend is not
always the best way to conquer him. I have always found exercise and the
open air better than reasoning. But such weather as is now without doors
does not encourage _la petite guerre_, so we must give him battle in
form, by letting both mind and body know that, supposing one the House
of Commons and the other the House of Peers, my will is sovereign over
both. There is a good description of this species of mental weakness in
the fine play of Beaumont and Fletcher called _The Lover's Progress_,
where the man, warned that his death is approaching, works himself into
an agony of fear, and calls for assistance, though there is no apparent
danger. The apparition of the innkeeper's ghost, in the same play,
hovers between the ludicrous and [the terrible]. To me the touches of
the former quality which it contains seem to augment the effect of the
latter--- they seem to give reality to the supernatural, as being
circumstances with which an inventor would hardly have garnished his
story.[68]

Will Clerk says he has a theory on the vitrified forts. I wonder if he