rous apt to slip through your fingers.[62] Dined at
home with Lady S. and Anne.

_December_ 9.--Yesterday I read and wrote the whole day and evening.
To-day I shall not be so happy. Having Gas-Light Company to attend at
two, I must be brief in journalising.

The gay world has been kept in hot water lately by the impudent
publication of the celebrated Harriet Wilson, ---- from earliest
possibility, I suppose, who lived with half the gay world at hack and
manger, and now obliges such as will not pay hush-money with a history
of whatever she knows or can invent about them. She must have been
assisted in the style, spelling, and diction, though the attempt at wit
is very poor, that at pathos sickening. But there is some good retailing
of conversations, in which the style of the speakers, so far as known to
me, is exactly imitated, and some things told, as said by individuals of
each other, which will sound unpleasantly in each other's ears. I admire
the address of Lord A----y, himself very severely handled from time to
time. Some one asked him if H.W. had been pretty correct on the whole.
"Why, faith," he replied, "I believe so"--when, raising his eyes, he saw
Quentin Dick, whom the little jilt had treated atrociously--"what
concerns the present company always excepted, you know," added Lord
A----y, with infinite presence of mind. As he was _in pari casu_ with
Q.D. no more could be said. After all, H.W. beats Con Philips, Anne
Bellamy, and all former demireps out and out. I think I supped once in
her company, more than twenty years since, at Mat Lewis's in Argyle
Street, where the company, as the Duke says to Lucio, chanced to be
"fairer than honest."[63] She was far from beautiful, if it be the same
_chiffonne_, but a smart saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and
the manners of a wild schoolboy. I am glad this accidental meeting has
escaped her memory--or, perhaps, is not accurately recorded in
mine--for, being a sort of French falconer, who hawk at all they see, I
might have had a distinction which I am far from desiring.

Dined at Sir John Hay's--a large party; Skenes there, the Newenhams and
others, strangers. In the morning a meeting of Oil Gas Committee. The
concern lingers a little;

"It may do weel, for ought it's done yet,
But only--it's no just begun yet."[64]

_December 10._--A stormy and rainy day. Walked from the Court through
the rain. I don't dislike this. Egad, I rather like it; for no man