'Do you know the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire? And have you ever seen
Chatsworth? I was at Chatsworth on Monday: I had indeed seen it before,
but never when its owners were at home; I was very kindly received, and
honestly pressed to stay: but I told them that a sick man is not a fit
inmate of a great house. But I hope to go again some time.'
Sept. 11. 'I think nothing grows worse, but all rather better, except
sleep, and that of late has been at its old pranks. Last evening, I
felt what I had not known for a long time, an inclination to walk for
amusement; I took a short walk, and came back again neither breathless
nor fatigued. This has been a gloomy, frigid, ungenial summer, but of
late it seems to mend; I hear the heat sometimes mentioned, but I do not
feel it:
"Praeterea minimus gelido jam in corpore sanguis
Febre calet sola.--"
I hope, however, with good help, to find means of supporting a winter at
home, and to hear and tell at the Club what is doing, and what ought to
be doing in the world. I have no company here, and shall naturally come
home hungry for conversation. To wish you, dear Sir, more leisure, would
not be kind; but what leisure you have, you must bestow upon me.'
Lichfield, Sept. 29. 'On one day I had three letters about the
air-balloon: yours was far the best, and has enabled me to impart to
my friends in the country an idea of this species of amusement. In
amusement, mere amusement, I am afraid it must end, for I do not find
that its course can be directed so as that it should serve any purposes
of communication; and it can give no new intelligence of the state of
the air at different heights, till they have ascended above the height
of mountains, which they seem never likely to do. I came hither on the
27th. How long I shall stay I have not determined. My dropsy is gone,
and my asthma much remitted, but I have felt myself a little declining
these two days, or at least to-day; but such vicissitudes must be
expected. One day may be worse than another; but this last month is far
better than the former; if the next should be as much better than this,
I shall run about the town on my own legs.'
October 25. 'You write to me with a zeal that animates, and a tenderness
that melts me. I am not afraid either of a journey to London, or a
residence in it. I came down with little fatigue, and am now not
weaker. In the smoky atmosphere I was delivered from the dropsy, which
I consider as the original and radical disease. The town is my element*;
there are my friends, there are my books, to which I have not yet bid
farewell, and there are my amusements. Sir Joshua told me long ago that
my vocation was to publick life, and I hope still to keep my station,
till God shall bid me Go in peace.'
* His love of London continually appears. In a letter from
him to Mrs. Smart, wife of his friend the Poet, which is
published in a well-written life of him, prefixed to an
edition of his Poems, in 1791, there is the following
sentence:--'To one that has passed so many years in the
pleasures and opulence of London, there are few places that
can give much delight.'
Once, upon reading that line in the curious epitaph quoted
in The Spectator,
'Born in New-England, did in London die;'
he laughed and said, 'I do not wonder at this. It would
have been strange, if born in London, he had died in
New-England.'--BOSWELL.