WAS I in a condition to stipulate with Death, as I am this moment with
my apothecary, how and where I will take his clyster——I should
certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends; and
therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this
great catastrophe, which generally takes up and torments my thoughts as
much as the catastrophe itself; but I constantly draw the curtain
across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order
it, that it happen not to me in my own house——but rather in some decent
inn——at home, I know it,——the concern of my friends, and the last
services of wiping my brows, and smoothing my pillow, which the
quivering hand of pale affection shall pay me, will so crucify my soul,
that I shall die of a distemper which my physician is not aware of: but
in an inn, the few cold offices I wanted, would be purchased with a few
guineas, and paid me with an undisturbed, but punctual attention——but
mark. This inn should not be the inn at _Abbeville_——if there was not
another inn in the universe, I would strike that inn out of the
capitulation: so
Let the horses be in the chaise exactly by four in the morning——Yes, by
four, Sir,——or by _Genevieve!_ I’ll raise a clatter in the house shall
wake the dead.