Happily the complaint abated without his being put to the torture of
amputation. But we must surely admire the manly resolution which he
discovered while it hung over him.
In a letter to the same gentleman he writes, 'The gout has within these
four days come upon me with a violence which I never experienced before.
It made me helpless as an infant.' And in another, having mentioned Mrs.
Williams, he says,--'whose death following that of Levett, has now made
my house a solitude. She left her little substance to a charity-school.
She is, I hope, where there is neither darkness, nor want, nor sorrow.'
I wrote to him, begging to know the state of his health, and mentioned
that Baxter's _Anacreon_[747], 'which is in the library at Auchinleck,
was, I find, collated by my father in 1727, with the MS. belonging to
the University of Leyden, and he has made a number of Notes upon it.
Would you advise me to publish a new edition of it?'