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

Dr. Jebb from London.*

Norwich physician, I sent for
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 pro-

nounced, 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 appre

* 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.

hensions. 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 acquits him of everything. I had greatly improved his fortune, and should have effected much more, had he not instantly taken everything 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 everything 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

*The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were then at Florence.