I have much to comfort me in the present aspect of my family. My eldest
son, independent in fortune, united to an affectionate wife--and of good
hopes in his profession; my second, with a good deal of talent, and in
the way, I trust, of cultivating it to good purpose; Anne, an honest,
downright, good Scots lass, in whom I would only wish to correct a
spirit of satire; and Lockhart is Lockhart, to whom I can most willingly
confide the happiness of the daughter who chose him, and whom he has
chosen. My dear wife, the partner of early cares and successes, is, I
fear, frail in health--though I trust and pray she may see me out.
Indeed, if this troublesome complaint goes on--it bodes no long
existence. My brother was affected with the same weakness, which, before
he was fifty, brought on mortal symptoms. The poor Major had been rather
a free liver. But my father, the most abstemious of men, save when the
duties of hospitality required him to be very moderately free with his
bottle, and that was very seldom, had the same weakness which now annoys
me, and he, I think, was not above seventy when cut off. Square the
odds, and good-night Sir Walter about sixty. I care not, if I leave my
name unstained, and my family properly settled. _Sat est vixisse_.

_December 8._--Talking of the _vixisse_, it may not be impertinent to
notice that Knox, a young poet of considerable talent, died here a week
or two since. His father was a respectable yeoman, and he himself,
succeeding to good farms under the Duke of Buccleuch, became too soon
his own master, and plunged into dissipation and ruin. His poetical
talent, a very fine one, then showed itself in a fine strain of pensive
poetry, called, I think, _The Lonely Hearth_, far superior to those of
Michael Bruce, whose consumption, by the way, has been the _life_ of his
verses. But poetry, nay, good poetry, is a drug in the present day. I am
a wretched patron. I cannot go with a subscription-paper, like a
pocket-pistol about me, and draw unawares on some honest