him, this could scarcely have been a competence; and if, as appears not very clearly from a note in the Journal, he now resigned his office to his half-brother, who had long been his assistant, his private affairs at the beginning of the winter of 1753-54 must, as he says, have “had but a gloomy aspect.” In the event of his death his wife and children could have no hope except from some acknowledgment by the Government of his past services.
Meanwhile his diseases were slowly gaining ground. The terrible winter of 1753-54, which, from the weather record in the Gentleman’s, seems, with small intermission, to have been prolonged far into April, was especially trying to asthmatic patients, and consequently wholly against him. In February he returned to town, and put himself under the care of the notorious Dr. Joshua Ward of Pall Mall, by whom he was treated and tapped for dropsy. [Footnote: Ward appears in Hogarth’s Consultation of Physicians, 1736, and in Pope—“Ward try’d on Puppies, and the Poor, his Drop.” He was a quack, but must have possessed considerable ability. Bolingbroke wished Pope to consult him in 1744; and he attended George II. There is an account of him in Nichols’s Genuine Works of Hogarth, i. 89.] He was at his worst, he says, “on that memorable day when the public lost Mr. Pelham (March 6th);” but from this time, he began, under Ward’s medicines, to acquire “some little degree of strength,” although his dropsy increased. With May came the long-delayed spring, and he moved to Fordhook, [Footnote: It lay on the Uxbridge Road, a little beyond Acton, and nearly opposite the subsequent site of the Ealing Common Station of the Metropolitan District Railway. The spot is now occupied by “commodious villas.”] a “little house” belonging to him at Ealing, the air of which place then enjoyed a considerable reputation, being reckoned the best in Middlesex, “
