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prodigy of generalship.* In one word, I look upon great part of America as lost to this country! It is not less deplorable, that between art and contention, such an inveteracy has been sown between the two countries as will probably outlast even the war! Supposing this unnatural enmity should not soon involve us in other wars, which would be extraordinary indeed, what a difference, in a future war with France and Spain, to have the Colonies in the opposite scale, instead of being in ours! What politicians are those who have preferred the empty name of sovereignty to that of alliance, and forced subsidies to the golden ocean of commerce!

Alas! the trade of America is not all we shall lose! The ocean of commerce wafted us wealth at the return of regular tides: but we had acquired an empire too, in whose plains the beggars we sent out as labourers could reap sacks of gold in three or four harvests; and who with their sickles and reaping-hooks have robbed and cut the throats of those who sowed the grain. These rapacious foragers have fallen together by the ears; and our Indain affairs, I suppose, will soon be in as desperate a state as our American. Lord Pigot has been treacherously and violently imprisoned, and the Company here has voted his restoration.t I know nothing of the merits of the cause on either side: I dare to say, both are very blameable. I look only to the consequences, which I do not doubt will precipitate the loss of our acquisitions there; the title to which I never admired, and the possession of which I always regarded as a transitory vision. If we could keep it, we should certainly plunder it, till the expense of maintaining would overbalance the returns; and, though it has rendered a little more than the holy city of Jerusalem, I look on such distant conquests as more destructive than beneficial; and, whether we are martyrs or banditti, whether we fight for the holy sepulchre or for lacks of rupees, I detest invasions of quiet kingdoms, both for their sakes and for our own; and it is happy for the former, that the latter are never permanently benefited.

Though I have been drawn away from your letter by the subject of it and by political reflections, I must not forget to thank you for your solicitude and advice about my health: but pray be assured that I am

* In December, when the cause of the Americans seemed hopeless, the English commander, having extended his cantonments to a prodigious length, Washington took advantage of that circumstance, crossed the Delaware in the night, surprised the left wing of the British army, and, attacking a body of Hessians nearly a thousand strong, surprised them so completely that they surrendered and were captured. Soon afterwards he gained an advantage, also in the dead of the night, over the British at Prince-town.-ED.

+ Lord Pigot had been appointed Governor of Madras, with instructions to restore the Rajah of Tanjore, under certain conditions. In attempting to carry them into execution, he was seized, by the direction of certain members of his own council, and conveyed to a place called the Mount; where he was confined in the strictest manner. Impaired by age and an Indian climate, the constitution of Lord Pigot sank under the irritation to which he had been exposed and the restraint to which he was subjected; and he died shortly after, the prisoner of those over whom he had been appointed to preside.-ED.

sufficiently attentive to it, and never stay long here in wet weather, which experience has told me is prejudicial. I am sorry for it, but I know London agrees with me better than the country. The latter suits my age and inclination; but my health is a more cogent reason, and governs me. I know my own constitution exactly, and have formed my way of life accordingly. No weather, nothing gives me cold; because, for these nine and thirty years, I have hardened myself so, by braving all weathers and taking no precautions against cold, that the extremest and most sudden changes do not affect me in that respect. Yet damp, without giving me cold, affects my nerves; and, the moment I feel it, I go to town. I am certainly better since my last fit of gout than ever I was after one: in short, perfectly well; that is, well enough for my age. In one word, I am very weak, but have no complaint; and as my constitution, frame, and health require no exercise, nothing but fatigue affects me: and therefore you, and all who are so good as to interest themselves about me and give advice, must excuse me if I take none. I am preached to about taking no care against catching cold and I am told I shall one day or other be caught -possibly: but I must die of something; and why should not what has done to sixty, be right? My regimen and practice have been formed on experience and success. Perhaps a practice that has suited the weakest of frames, would kill a Hercules. God forbid I should recommend it; for I never saw another human being that would not have died of my darings, especially in the gout. Yet I have always found benefit; because my nature is so feverish, that every thing cold inwardly or outwardly, suits me. Cold air and water are my specifics, and I shall die when I am not master enough of myself to employ them; or rather, as I said this winter, on comparing the iron texture of my inside with the debility of my outside, "I believe I shall have nothing but my inside left!" Therefore, my dear sir, my regard for you will last as long as there is an atom of me remaining.

LETTER CCXVII.

Barton Mills, April 28, 1777. AFTER an interval of three years, in which my nephew remained as much in his senses as he was supposed to be before his declared phrenzy, he was seized a fortnight ago with a fever which soon brought out the colour of his blood. In two days he was furious. The low wretches by whom in his sensible hours he has always been surrounded, concealed the symptoms till they were terrifying. I received no notice till the sixth day, and then-by the stage-coach! I set out directly for the hovel where he is-a pasnidge-house, as the reverend proprietor called it to me, on the edge of the fens, which my lord

* One Ball, Minister of Eriswell, a jockey-parson. He having taken his doctor's degree in an interval of his correspondence with Mr. Walpole on Lord Orford's

hires, and is his usual residence. The single chamber without a bed is a parlour seven feet high, directly under my lord's bed chamber, without shutters, and so smoky that there is no setting in it unless the door is open. I am forced to lie here, five miles off, in an inn-a palace to his dwelling. The morning after my arrival, a physician I had sent for from Norwich, forty miles from hence, coming down to tell me how he had found my lord, we were alarmed with a scream and a bustle. The doctor had ordered the window to be opened to let out the smoke, and, the moment he had quitted his patient, my lord attempted to fling himself out of the window, but was prevented by his keeper and servants, who flung him on the bed. You will scarcely believe that, on my arrival, his mistress, his steward, and a neighbouring parson of the confederacy, on my declaring I should remove him directly to London for proper assistance, cried out, that I should kill him if I conveyed him from that Paradise in which was all his delight, and where he has so long swallowed every apple that every serpent has offered to him. The very day before he had asked where he was.

At the desire of the Norwich physician, I sent for Dr. Jebb from London. Before he came, the fever was gone, and an interval of sense was returned. Yet, as before, he would only speak in a whisper, and could not be persuaded to show his tongue to Dr. Jebb, though he made rational answers. Dr. Jebb pronounced, that he had neither fever nor understanding. He has had a slight return of the former, and no delirium. Yet both his physicians, the apothecary, and even his mistress, think his disorder will still last some weeks. Perhaps it may not; nor is it the worst consideration that he will have these relapses: as this arrived in very cold weather, and from no apparent cause, the madness is evidently constitutional, and leaves both himself and his family with all their apprehensions. Mine are, that as both now and formerly he has betrayed mischievous designs, he will after some lucid interval destroy himself; and I have seen that the crew about him will not call in help till perhaps too late. They had not even sent for a physician; because, as they told me, my lord (a lunatic) has no opinion of physicians. Judge of my distress! My brother and I have too much tenderness and delicacy to take out the statute of lunacy. All my care and attention to him, his mistress, and fortune, in his former illness, have not made the smallest impression. I have not even seen him these three years, though he declared on his recovery that he approved all I had done; and I must say that I meant to set an example of tenderness which, I believe, was never seen before in a parallel case. I cannot resent it from him; for his misfortune

transactions about the parsonage-house, and Mr. Walpole directing his letter to him, ignorant of his titular advancement, "To Mr. Ball," the man in his answer was so absurd as to add a postscript in these words, "Dr. Ball, if you please, the next time you favour me."

* Dr. Richard Jebb. In the following year the King conferred the honour of a baronetage upon him, in consideration of his attention to the Duke of Gloucester during his severe illness in Italy.-ED.

acquits him of every thing. I had greatly improved his fortune, and should have effected much more, had he not instantly taken every thing out of my hands. This treatment, and many such reasons, had determined me never more to meddle with his affairs: indeed, the fatigue, joined to my apprehension, had half killed me. I had done every thing at my own risk, and some things at my own cost. Thus, without the sanction of law, which I will not claim for my lord's sake, I could not undertake his affairs again. I now declared I would take on me the care of his person and health, but never of his fortune-what will become of that I know not! My own peace, at the end of my life, and broken as I am, must weigh something. I have, from the instant my lord came of age, laboured to serve him-in vain. I have struggled hard to rescue and restore my family; a proud view, perhaps, yet as reasonable as most we have! Vision for vision, That insubstantial and transitory one, called Philosophy, that is, indifference, is, I suppose, the best. What are distant views in this world? To be realized when we are past knowing it. How idle are hopes about futurity, whether about our family or our country; and how little different in duration and extent, when compared with the succession of ages! If we hope our name and race, or if, on a grander scale, we wish the constitution of our country may last, are not those lofty views confined to two or three hundred years, which are but a moment in the revolution of endless centuries? The moment we step beyond the diminutive sphere of our familiar ideas, all is boundless and lost in immensity !-I descend to earth, to me and my little concerns.

I shall stay here to see the physician from Norwich to-morrow. If he pronounces, as I expect, that my lord is recovered, I shall take my leave, and resign him to the rudder of his own poor brain. I pity him, but it must be so. My character and Sir Edward's are at stake, and to preserve them we must obey the law literally. The last time, the moment the physicians pronounced him sane, we submitted and threw open his doors; though neither of us were of that opinion. I attended him to Houghton, and saw nothing but evidence of distraction. The gentlemen of the country came to congratulate him on his recovery; yet, for more than six weeks, he would do nothing but speak in the lowest voice, and would whisper to them at the length of the table, when the person next to him could not distinguish what he said. Every evening, precisely at the same hour, sitting round a table, he would join his forehead to his mistress's (who is forty, redfaced, and with black teeth, and with whom he has lived these twenty years,) and there they would sit for a quarter of an hour, like two parroquets, without speaking. Every night, from seven to nine, he regularly, for the whole fortnight, made his secretary of militia, an old drunken, broken tradesman, read Statius to the whole company, though the man could not hiccup the right quantity of the syllables. Imagine what I suffered. One morning I asked the company, before

my lord was up, how they found him? They answered, just as he had always been. Then, thought I, he has always been distracted.

Forgive my tiring you with these details! They have rushed into my memory again, and I cannot help venting them. I must expel them once more; though every sudden knock at my door at an unusual hour will terrify me, as it did for thirteen months three years ago. I have gone the round of all my thoughts, and can rest on no plan. Were families to have more power, it would be abused; and, as the law has fixed the criterion of sense, no private man for the best purposes must or can control it. I have done all I can; which is, to warn my lord's dependants of the danger of concealing the first symptoms of his infirmity; and have endeavoured to alarm them, for their own sakes, with the risk of his not observing rigid temperance."

Their interest in his health must combat their interest in flattering him. Adieu !

Arlington Street, May 2.

The Norwich physician said he found my lord so much better, that I left him two days ago; though his mistress desired I would leave the keeper, at least for a month.

LETTER CCLXVIII.

Arlington Street, May 14, 1777. YOUR last has given me both pain and pleasure. I know the gout too well not to suffer for you; though, when it begins but late in life, it is never very violent, and certainly is very wholesome discipline. It is ten times worse to have ceremony and princes to struggle with at such a moment; and I tremble lest your efforts against an enemy that will not bear an instant of contradiction, should have redoubled your torment. Oh! death itself does not regard princes less than the gout does. Then, on the other hand, I am charmed with the Duke's condescension; and the more, as he will have witnessed your disability. I am sure, in some ministers, he might with reason have suspected your confinement was political.

You do not owe to me, I assure you, the Duchess's graciousness. I did not even imagine they would pass through Florence. She has not at all forgotten that she was not royally born, and her good-nature and familiarity are not expelled by dignity. I am sure you found her as easy and natural, as if she had not married even Lord Waldegrave. When she left England, her beauty had lost no more than her good qualities. I am glad your Court† have behaved as they ought.

The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were then at Florence.

+ Leopold, Grand-Duke of Tuscany, son of Francis of Lorraine and the EmpressQueen Maria Theresa. He married Maria Louisa, Infanta of Spain. Under his

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