I begin to ask myself, Do I feel any symptoms of getting better from the climate?—­which is delicious,—­and I cannot reply with the least consciousness of certainty; I cannot in reason expect it should be otherwise:  the failure of my limbs has been gradual, and it cannot be expected that an infirmity which at least a year’s bad weather gradually brought on should diminish before a few mild and serene days, but I think there is some change to the better; I certainly write easier and my spirits are better.  The officers compliment me on this, and I think justly.  The difficulty will be to abstain from working hard, but we will try.  I wrote to Mr. Cadell to-day, and will send my letter ashore to be put into Gibraltar with the officer who leaves us at that garrison.  In the evening we saw the celebrated fortress, which we had heard of all our lives, and which there is no possibility of describing well in words, though the idea I had formed of it from prints, panoramas, and so forth, proved not very inaccurate.  Gibraltar, then, is a peninsula having a tremendous precipice on the Spanish side—­that is, upon the north, where it is united to the mainland by a low slip of land called the neutral ground.  The fortifications which rise on the rock are innumerable, and support each other in a manner accounted a model of modern art; the northern face of the rock itself is hewn into tremendous subterranean batteries called the hall of Saint George, and so forth, mounted with guns of a large calibre.  But I have heard it would be difficult to use them, from the effect of the report on the artillerymen.  The west side of the fortress is not so precipitous as the north, and it is on this it has been usually assailed.  It bristles with guns and batteries, and has at its northern extremity the town of Gibraltar, which seems from the sea a thriving place, and from thence declines gradually to Cape Europa, where there is a great number of remains of old caverns and towers, formerly the habitation or refuge of the Moors.  At a distance, and curving into a bay, lie Algeciras, and the little Spanish town of Saint Roque, where the Spanish lines were planted during the siege.[485] From Europa Point the eastern frontier of Gibraltar runs pretty close to the sea, and arises in a perpendicular face, and it is called the back of the rock.  No thought could be entertained of attacking it, although every means were used to make the assault as general as possible.  The efforts sustained by such extraordinary means as the floating batteries were entirely directed against the defences on the west side, which, if they could have been continued for a few days with the same fury with which they commenced, must have worn out the force of the garrison.  The assault had continued for several hours without success on either side, when a private man of the artillery, his eye on the floating batteries, suddenly called with ecstasy, “She burns, by G——!";[486] and first that vessel and then others were visibly discovered to be on fire, and the besiegers’ game was decidedly up.