"October 6. 1821.
"By this post I have sent my nightmare to balance the incubus of *
* *'s impudent anticipation of the Apotheosis of George the Third.
I should like you to take a look over it, as I think there are two
or three things in it which might please 'our puir hill folk.'
"By the last two or three posts I have written to you at length. My
_ague_ bows to me every two or three days, but we are not as yet
upon intimate speaking terms. I have an intermittent generally
every two years, when the climate is favourable (as it is here),
but it does me no harm. What I find worse, and cannot get rid of,
is the growing depression of my spirits, without sufficient cause.
I ride--I am not intemperate in eating or drinking--and my general
health is as usual, except a slight ague, which rather does good
than not. It must be constitutional; for I know nothing more than
usual to depress me to that degree.
"How do _you_ manage? I think you told me, at Venice, that your
spirits did not keep up without a little claret. I _can_ drink, and
bear a good deal of wine (as you may recollect in England); but it
don't exhilarate--it makes me savage and suspicious, and even
quarrelsome. Laudanum has a similar effect; but I can take much of
_it_ without any effect at all. The thing that gives me the
highest spirits (it seems absurd, but true) is a close of
_salts_--I mean in the afternoon, after their effect.[58] But one
can't take _them_ like champagne.
"Excuse this old woman's letter; but my _lemancholy_ don't depend
upon health, for it is just the same, well or ill, or here or
there.
"Yours," &c.
[Footnote 58: It was, no doubt, from a similar experience of its effects
that Dryden always took physic when about to write any thing of
importance. His caricature, Bayes, is accordingly made to say, "When I
have a grand design, I ever take physic and let blood; for, when you
would have pure swiftness of thought and fiery flights of fancy, you
must have a care of the pensive part;--in short," &c. &c.
On this subject of the effects of medicine upon the mind and spirits,
some curious facts and illustrations have been, with his usual research,
collected by Mr. D'Israeli, in his amusing "Curiosities of Literature."]
* * * * *