Constable's business seems unintelligible. No man thought the house worth less than £150,000. Constable told me when he was making his will that he was worth £80,000. Great profits on almost all the adventures. No bad speculations--yet neither stock nor debt to show: Constable might have eaten up his share; but Cadell was very frugal. No doubt trading almost entirely on accommodation is dreadfully expensive.[141] _January_ 30.--_False delicacy_. Mr. Gibson, Mr. Cowan, Mr. J.B., were with me last night to talk over important matters, and suggest an individual for a certain highly confidential situation. I was led to mention a person of whom I knew nothing but that he was an honest and intelligent man. All seemed to acquiesce, and agreed to move the thing to the party concerned this morning, and so Mr. G. and Mr. C. left me, when J.B. let out that it was their unanimous opinion that we should be in great trouble were the individual appointed, from faults of temper, etc., which would make it difficult to get on with him. With a hearty curse I hurried J.B. to let them know that I had no partiality for the man whatever, and only named him because he had been proposed for a similar situation elsewhere. This is provoking enough, that they would let me embarrass my affairs with a bad man (an unfit one, I mean) rather than contradict me. I dare say great men are often used so. I laboured freely yesterday. The stream rose fast--if clearly, is another question; but there is bulk for it, at least--about thirty printed pages. "And now again, boys, to the oar." _January_ 31.--There being nothing in the roll to-day, I stay at home from the Court, and add another day's perfect labour to _Woodstock_, which is worth five days of snatched intervals, when the current of thought and invention is broken in upon, and the mind shaken and diverted from its purpose by a succession of petty interruptions. I have now no pecuniary provisions to embarrass me, and I think, now the shock of the discovery is past and over, I am much better off on the whole; I am as if I had shaken off from my shoulders a great mass of garments, rich, indeed, but cumbrous, and always more a burden than a comfort. I am free of an hundred petty public duties imposed on me as a man of consideration--of the expense of a great hospitality--and, what is better, of the great waste of time connected with it. I have known, in my day, all kinds of society, and can pretty well estimate how much or how little one loses by retiring from all but that which is very intimate. I sleep and eat, and work as I was wont; and if I could see those about me as indifferent to the loss of rank as I am, I should be completely happy. As it is, Time must salve that sore, and to Time I trust it.