"March, 1804.
My dear friend,
Though fearful of breaking in upon you after what you have written to me,
I could not have left England without having written both to you and your
brother, at the very moment I received a note from Sharp, informing me
that I must instantly secure a place in the Portsmouth mail for Tuesday,
and if I could not, that I must do so in the light coach for Tuesday's
early coach.
I am agitated by many things, and only write now because you desired an
answer by return of post. I have been dangerously ill, but the illness is
going about, and not connected with my immediate ill health, however it
may be with my general constitution. It was the cholera-morbus. But for a
series of the merest accidents I should have been seized in the streets,
in a bitter east wind, with cold rain; at all events have walked through
it struggling. It was Sunday-night.
I have suffered it at Tobin's; Tobin sleeping out at Woolwich. No fire,
no wine or spirits, or medicine of any kind, and no person being within a
call, but luckily, perhaps the occasion would better suit the word
providentially, Tuffin, calling, took me home with him.... I tremble at
every loud sound I myself utter. But this is rather a history of the past
than of the present. I have only enough for memento, and already on
Wednesday I consider myself in clear sunshine, without the shadow of the
wings of the destroying angel.
What else relates to myself, I will write on Monday. Would to heaven you
were going with me to Malta, if it were but for the voyage! With all
other things I could make the passage with an unwavering mind. But
without cheerings of hope, let me mention one thing; Lord Cadogan was
brought to absolute despair, and hatred of life, by a stomach complaint,
being now an old man. The symptoms, as stated to me, were strikingly like
yours, excepting the nervous difference of the two characters; the
flittering fever, &c. He was advised to reduce lean beef to a pure jelly,
by Papin's digester, with as little water as could secure it from
burning, and of this to take half a wine glass 10 or 14 times a day. This
and nothing else. He did so. Sir George Beaumont saw, within a few weeks
a letter from himself to Lord St. Asaph, in which he relates the
circumstance of his perseverance in it, and rapid amelioration, and final
recovery. 'I am now,' he says, 'in real good health; as good, and in as
cheerful spirits as I ever was when a young man.'
May God bless you, even here,