December 30.—­Wrote and wrought hard, then went out a drive with Mr. and Mrs. Percival; and went round by the lake.  If my days of good fortune should ever return I will lay out some pretty rides at Abbotsford.

Last day of an eventful year; much evil and some good; but especially the courage to endure what Fortune sends without becoming a pipe for her fingers.[437]

It is not the last day of the year, but to-morrow being Sunday we hold our festival of neighbours to-day instead.  The Fergusons came en masse, and we had all the usual appliances of mirth and good cheer.  Yet our party, like the chariot-wheels of Pharaoh in the Red Sea, dragged heavily.

Some of the party grow old and infirm; others thought of the absence of the hostess, whose reception of her guests was always kind.  We did as well as we could, however.

    “It’s useless to murmur and pout—­
    There’s no good in making ado;
    ’Tis well the old year is out,
    And time to begin a new.”

December 31.—­It must be allowed that the regular recurrence of annual festivals among the same individuals has, as life advances, something in it that is melancholy.  We meet on such occasions like the survivors of some perilous expedition, wounded and weakened ourselves, and looking through the diminished ranks of those who remain, while we think of those who are no more.  Or they are like the feasts of the Caribs, in which they held that the pale and speechless phantoms of the deceased appeared and mingled with the living.  Yet where shall we fly from vain repining?  Or why should we give up the comfort of seeing our friends, because they can no longer be to us, or we to them, what we once were to each other?

FOOTNOTES: 

[420] During the winter of 1826-7 Sir Walter suffered great pain (enough to have disturbed effectually any other man’s labours, whether official or literary) from successive attacks of rheumatism, which seems to have been fixed on him by the wet sheets of one of his French inns; and his Diary contains, besides, various indications that his constitution was already shaking under the fatigue to which he had subjected it.  Formerly, however great the quantity of work he put through his hands, his evenings were almost all reserved for the light reading of an elbow-chair, or the enjoyment of his family and friends.  Now he seemed to grudge every minute that was not spent at his desk.  The little that he read of new books, or for mere amusement, was done by snatches in the course of his meals; and to walk, when he could walk at all, to the Parliament House, and back again through the Princes Street Gardens, was his only exercise and his only relaxation.  Every ailment, of whatever sort, ended in aggravating his lameness; and, perhaps, the severest test his philosophy encountered was the feeling of bodily helplessness that from week to week crept upon him.  The winter, to make bad worse, was a very cold and stormy one.  The growing sluggishness of his blood showed itself in chilblains, not only on the feet but the fingers, and his handwriting becomes more and more cramped and confused.—­Life, vol. ix. pp. 58-9.