[130] This enthusiastic Gaelic scholar, then parish minister of Laggan, joined the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, and was elected Moderator of its General Assembly in 1849.  As a clergyman, he had afterwards a varied experience in this country and in Australia, before he finally settled in the island of Harris; he died at Portobello in 1873.

The Gaelic dictionary of the Highland Society was completed and published in 2 vols. 4to, 1828.  The editor was Dr. Macleod of Dundonald, assisted by other Gaelic scholars.  Dr. Mackay edited the poems of Rob Donn in 1829.—­See Quarterly Review, July 1831.

[131] See next page, under Feb. 19.

[132] The Right Hon. David Boyle.

[133] My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, etc.

[134] See Jan. 25, 1828 (p. 114).

[135] To kilt, i.e. to elevate or lift up anything quickly; this applied, ludicrously, to tucking by a halter.—­Jamieson’s Dictionary.

“Their bare preaching now Makes the thrush bush keep the cow Better than Scots or English kings Could do by kilting them with strings.”

CLELAND.

[136] See Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, Act I. Sc. 3.

[137] See Boswell’s Johnson, Croker’s ed. imp. 8vo, p. 318.

[138] Sir Reginald Steuart Seton of Staffa, for many years Secretary to the Highland and Agricultural Society; died at Edinburgh in 1838.

[139] On reading the savage article on Hunt’s Byron published in Blackwood, for March 1828, Sir Walter’s thoughts must have gone back not only to Gourgaud’s affair of the previous year, and to the more serious matter of the Beacon newspaper in 1821,—­when, to use Lord Cockburn’s words, “it was dreadful to think that a life like Scott’s was for a moment in peril in such a cause”—­but he must also have had very sad recollections of the bloody results of the two melancholy duels arising from the same party rancour in February 1821 (Scott and Christie) and in March 1822 (Stuart and Boswell), with all the untold domestic miseries accompanying them.  It is satisfactory to think that this was about the last of these uncalled for literary onslaughts, as one finds, in turning over the pages of Blackwood, that in 1834 Professor Wilson in the Noctes rebukes some one for reviving “forgotten falsehoods,” praises Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, and adds the ecstatic words, which he also addressed later on to Lord Jeffrey, “The animosities are mortal, but the humanities live for ever.”

[140] Act III.  Sc. 1.

[141] Sholto Douglas, eighteenth Earl of Morton.

MARCH.

March 1.—­Wrought a little this morning; always creeping on.  We had a hard pull at the Court, and after it I walked a little for exercise, as I fear indigestion from dining out so often.

Dined to-day with the bankers who went as delegates to London in Malachi Malagrowther’s days.  Sir John Hay Kinnear and Tom Allan were my only acquaintances of the party; the rest seemed shrewd capable men.  I particularly remarked a Mr. Sandeman with as intellectual a head as I ever witnessed.