to the pole, so, through torment and languor and the heats of fever, the mind of Wolfe dwelt on the capture of Quebec.  His illness, which began before the twentieth of August, had so far subsided on the twenty-fifth that Knox wrote in his Diary of that day:  “His Excellency General Wolfe is on the recovery, to the inconceivable joy of the whole army.”  On the twenty-ninth he was able to write or dictate a letter to the three brigadiers, Monckton, Townshend, and Murray:  “That the public service may not suffer by the General’s indisposition, he begs the brigadiers will meet and consult together for the public utility and advantage, and consider of the best method to attack the enemy.”  The letter then proposes three plans, all bold to audacity.  The first was to send a part of the army to ford the Montmorenci eight or nine miles above its mouth, march through the forest, and fall on the rear of the French at Beauport, while the rest landed and attacked them in front.  The second was to cross the ford at the mouth of the Montmorenci and march along the strand, under the French intrenchments, till a place could be found where the troops might climb the heights.  The third was to make a general attack from boats at the Beauport flats.  Wolfe had before entertained two other plans, one of which was to scale the heights at St. Michel, about a league above Quebec; but this he had abandoned on learning that the French were there in force to receive him.  The other was to storm the Lower Town; but this also he had abandoned, because the Upper Town, which commanded it, would still remain inaccessible.

The brigadiers met in consultation, rejected the three plans proposed in the letter, and advised that an attempt should be made to gain a footing on the north shore above the town, place the army between Montcalm and his base of supply, and so force him to fight or surrender.  The scheme was similar to that of the heights of St. Michel.  It seemed desperate, but so did all the rest; and if by chance it should succeed, the gain was far greater than could follow any success below the town.  Wolfe embraced it at once.

Not that he saw much hope in it.  He knew that every chance was against him.  Disappointment in the past and doom in the future, the pain and exhaustion of disease, toils, and anxieties “too great,” in the words of Burke, “to be supported by a delicate constitution, and a body unequal to the vigorous and enterprising soul that it lodged,” threw him at times into deep dejection.  By those intimate with him he was heard to say that he would not go back defeated, “to be exposed to the censure and reproach of an ignorant populice.”  In other moods he felt that he ought not to sacrifice what was left of his diminished army in vain conflict with hopeless obstacles.  But his final resolve once taken, he would not swerve from it.  His fear was that he might not be able to lead his troops in person.  “I know perfectly well you cannot cure me,” he said to his physician; “but pray make me so that I may be without pain for a few days, and able to do my duty:  that is all I want.”