The condition of your wretched country is worse than you represent it to be. The healthful Indian follows his master, who died of sickness, to the grave; but I much doubt, whether those charitable legislators exact the same, when the master is a lunatick, and cuts his own throat. I mourn over Ireland with all my heart, but I pity you more. In reading your letter, I feel your pulse; and I judge of your distemper as surely by the figures into which you cast your ink, as the learned doctor, at the hand and urinal[1], could do, if he pored over your water. You are really in a very bad way. You say your memory declines: I believe it does, since you forget your friends, and since repeated importunity can hardly draw a token of remembrance from you. There are bad airs for the mind, as well as the body: and what do you imagine, that Plato, since you have set me upon quoting him (who thanked Heaven, that he was not a Bœotian) would have said of the ultima Thule? Shake off your laziness, ramble over hither, and spend some months in a kinder climate. You will be in danger of meeting but one plague here, and you will leave many behind you. Here you will come among people, who lead a life singular enough to hit your humour; so near the world, as to have all its conveniencies; so far from the world, as to be strangers to all its inconveniencies; wanting nothing which goes to the ease and happiness of life; embarrassed by nothing which is cumbersome. I dare almost venture to say, that you will like us better than the persons you live with, and that we shall be able to make you retrograde (that I may
- ↑ The sign of a noted quack in those days.
