June 28th 1830

282 MONDAY In the morning workd as usual at proofs and copy of my Infernal Demonology, a task to which my poverty and not my will consents.3 About twelve o'clock I went to the country to take a day's relaxation. We, i.e. Mr. Cadell, Mr. James Ballantyne and I, went to Preston pans and getting there about one surveyd the little village where my aunt and I were lodgers for the sake of sea bathing in 1778'* I believe. I knew the house of Mr. Warroch where we lived a poor cottage of which the owners and their family are extinct. I recollected my juvenile ideas of dignity attendant on the large gate - a black arch which lets out upon the sea. I saw the church where I yawnd under the inflictions of a Doctor McCormick, a name in which dullness seems to have been hereditary. I saw the links where I arrangd my shells upon the turf and swam my little skiffs in the pools - Many comparaisons betwe[e]n the man and the recollections of my kind aunt, of old George Constable5 who I think dangled after her, ofDelgaty a veteran half pay Lieu [t] enant who swaggerd his solitary walk on the Parade as he calld a little open space before the same pool. We went to P [r] eston and took refuge from a thunder plump in the old tower. I rememberd the little garde [n] where I was cramd with goose berries and the fear I had of Blind Harry ['s]6 spectre ofFawdoun shewing his headless trunk at one of the windows. I rememberd also a very good natured pretty girl (my Mary Duff7) whom I laughd and rompd with and loved as children love. She was a Miss Dalrymple, daughter of Lord Westhall a Lord of Session, was afterwards married to Anderson ofWinterfield, and her daught[er] is now [the wife] of my colleague Robert Hamilton. So strangely are our cards shufled. I was a mere child and could feel none of the Passion which Byron alleges, yet the recollection of this good humourd companion of my childhood is like that [of] a morning dream nor should I now greatly like to dispell it by seeing the original who must now be sufficiently time honourd.
  1. '[Prepared] for either eventuality.'
  2. '27' in the original. Cadell's Diary proves, however, that the excursion took place on Monday the 28th.
  3. Romeo and Juliet, v. I.
  4. For Scott's reminiscences of these early days with his aunt Janet, see Life, i. 32-5.
  5. In a letter to Basil Hall, Scott names him as the original of Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary. Letters, xii. 36.
  6. The author of the fifteenth-century poem The Wallace.
  7. An early love of Byron's.
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