"'With a trembling hand, my beloved Miss Ponsonby, do I take up the
pen to thank you for a thrice kind letter. It had not remained
several weeks unacknowledged, but for this terrible malady of the
head, which has oppressed me with so much severity during the
interim. I think it must soon lay me low. Not at my time of life
does the constitution, pushed from its equipoise by long enduring
disease, regain it amid the struggles.
"Immediately on receiving your last, I sent for Madoc; by far the
most captivating work of its genuinely inspired author."