_January_ 23.--I have got a piece of armour, a knee-cap of chamois leather, which I think does my unlucky rheumatism some good. I begin, too, to sleep at night, which is a great comfort. Spent this day completely in labour; only betwixt dinner and tea, while husbanding a tumbler of whisky and water, I read the new novel, _Elizabeth de Bruce_[449]--part of it, that is. _January_ 24.--Visit from Mr. Audubon, who brings some of his birds. The drawings are of the first order--the attitudes of the birds of the most animated character, and the situations appropriate; one of a snake attacking a bird's nest, while the birds (the parents) peck at the reptile's eyes--they usually, in the long-run, destroy him, says the naturalist. The feathers of these gay little sylphs, most of them from the Southern States, are most brilliant, and are represented with what, were it [not] connected with so much spirit in the attitude, I would call a laborious degree of execution. This extreme correctness is of the utmost consequence to the naturalist, [but] as I think (having no knowledge of _virtu_), rather gives a stiffness to the drawings. This sojourner in the desert had been in the woods for months together. He preferred associating with the Indians to the company of the Back Settlers; very justly, I daresay, for a civilised man of the lower order--that is, the dregs of civilisation--when thrust back on the savage state becomes worse than a savage. They are Wordsworth's adventurer, "Deliberate and undeceived The wild men's vices who received, And gave them back his own."[450] The Indians, he says, are dying fast; they seem to pine and die whenever the white population approaches them. The Shawanese, who amounted, Mr. Audubon says, to some thousands within his memory, are almost extinct, and so are various other tribes. Mr. Audubon could never hear any tradition about the mammoth, though he made anxious inquiries. He gives no countenance to the idea that the Red Indians were ever a more civilised people than at this day, or that a more civilised people had preceded them in North America. He refers the bricks, etc., occasionally found, and appealed to in support of this opinion, to the earlier settlers,--or, where kettles and other utensils may have been found, to the early trade between the Indians and the Spaniards. John Russell[451] and Leonard Horner[452] came to consult me about the propriety and possibility of retaining the northern pronunciation of the Latin in the new Edinburgh Academy.[453] I will think of it until to-morrow, being no great judge. We had our solitary dinner; indeed, it is only remarkable nowadays when we have a guest.