He told us, that he had in one day written six sheets of a translation from the French[411], adding, ’I should be glad to see it now.  I wish that I had copies of all the pamphlets written against me, as it is said Pope had.  Had I known that I should make so much noise in the world, I should have been at pains to collect them.  I believe there is hardly a day in which there is not something about me in the newspapers.’

On Monday, June 4, we all went to Luton-Hoe, to see Lord Bute’s magnificent seat[412], for which I had obtained a ticket.  As we entered the park, I talked in a high style of my old friendship with Lord Mountstuart[413], and said, ‘I shall probably be much at this place.’  The Sage, aware of human vicissitudes, gently checked me:  ’Don’t you be too sure of that.’  He made two or three peculiar observations; as when shewn the botanical garden, ‘Is not every garden a botanical garden?’ When told that there was a shrubbery to the extent of several miles:  ’That is making a very foolish use of the ground; a little of it is very well.’  When it was proposed that we should walk on the pleasure-ground; ’Don’t let us fatigue ourselves.  Why should we walk there?  Here’s a fine tree, let’s get to the top of it.’  But upon the whole, he was very much pleased.  He said, ’This is one of the places I do not regret having come to see.  It is a very stately place, indeed; in the house magnificence is not sacrificed to convenience, nor convenience to magnificence.  The library is very splendid:  the dignity of the rooms is very great; and the quantity of pictures is beyond expectation, beyond hope.’

It happened without any previous concert, that we visited the seat of Lord Bute upon the King’s birthday; we dined and drank his Majesty’s health at an inn, in the village of Luton.

In the evening I put him in mind of his promise to favour me with a copy of his celebrated Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, and he was at last pleased to comply with this earnest request, by dictating it to me from his memory; for he believed that he himself had no copy[414].  There was an animated glow in his countenance while he thus recalled his high-minded indignation.

He laughed heartily at a ludicrous action in the Court of Session, in which I was Counsel.  The Society of Procurators, or Attornies, entitled to practise in the inferiour courts at Edinburgh, had obtained a royal charter, in which they had taken care to have their ancient designation of Procurators changed into that of Solicitors, from a notion, as they supposed, that it was more genteel[415]; and this new title they displayed by a publick advertisement for a General Meeting at their HALL.

It has been said, that the Scottish nation is not distinguished for humour; and, indeed, what happened on this occasion may in some degree justify the remark:  for although this society had contrived to make themselves a very prominent object for the ridicule of such as might stoop to it, the only joke to which it gave rise, was the following paragraph, sent to the newspaper called The Caledonian Mercury:—­