I am not old enough, nor tenacious enough, to pretend not to understand the main purport of your last letter; and to show you that I do, you may draw upon me for two hundred pounds, which, I hope, will more than clear you.

Good-night:  ‘aquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem’:  Be neither transported nor depressed by the accidents of life.

LETTER CCXLIV

Blackheath, May 16, 1759

My dear friend:  Your secretary’s last letter of the 4th, which I received yesterday, has quieted my fears a good deal, but has not entirely dissipated them.  Your fever still continues, he says, though in A less degree.  Is it a continued fever, or an intermitting one?  If the former, no wonder that you are weak, and that your head aches.  If the latter, why has not the bark, in substance and large doses, been administered? for if it had, it must have stopped it by this time.  Next post, I hope, will set me quite at ease.  Surely you have not been so regular as you ought, either in your medicines or in your general regimen, otherwise this fever would not have returned; for the Doctor calls it, your fever returned, as if you had an exclusive patent for it.  You have now had illnesses enough, to know the value of health, and to make you implicitly follow the prescriptions of your physician in medicines, and the rules of your own common sense in diet; in which, I can assure you, from my own experience, that quantity is often worse than quality; and I would rather eat half a pound of bacon at a meal, than two pounds of any the most wholesome food.

I have been settled here near a week, to my great satisfaction; ’c’est ma place’, and I know it, which is not given to everybody.  Cut off from social life by my deafness, as well as other physical ills, and being at best but the ghost of my former self, I walk here in silence and solitude as becomes a ghost:  with this only difference, that I walk by day, whereas, you know, to be sure, that other ghosts only appear by night.  My health, however, is better than it was last year, thanks to my almost total milk diet.  This enables me to vary my solitary amusements, and alternately to scribble as well as read, which I could not do last year.  Thus I saunter away the remainder, be it more or less, of an agitated and active life, now reduced (and I am not sure that I am a loser by the change) to so quiet and serene a one, that it may properly be called still life.