“Grosvenor, I do not like the accounts which reach me of your health. Elmsley says you look ill; your friend Smith tells me the same tale; and I know you are not going the way to amendment. Instead of that office and regular business, you ought to be in the country, with no other business than to amuse yourself: a longer stay at Bath would have benefited you; if the waters were really of use to you, you ought to give them a longer trial. . . . . As for ‘It can’t be,’ and ‘I must be at the office,’ and such-like phrases, when a man is seriously ill they mean nothing.*
“Tom is with me, and has been here about a fortnight, and kept me in as wholesome a state of idleness as I wish you to enjoy.
“Since the last semi-letter I wrote, my state affairs have been settled, and my unsecretaryfication completed,—a good sinecure gone; but, instead of thinking the loss unlucky, I only think how lucky it was I ever had it. A light heart and a thin pair of breeches,—you know the song; and it applies, for, breeches being the generic name, pantaloons are included in all their modifications, and I sit at the
* “Have you time to die, sir?” was the home question of a London physician to a patient, a lawyer in full practice, who was making similar excuses for not taking his prescription of rest and freedom from anxious thought; and it admitted but of one reply. |
| 188 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“So many virtues were discovered in me when I was Mr. Secretary, that I suppose nothing short of sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion, will be found possible reasons for my loss of office. The old devil will be said to have entered, having taken with him seven other evil spirits, and the last state of that man (meaning me) will be worse than the first.
“But I hope I am coming to live near London: not in its filth; if John May can find me a good snug house about Richmond, there I will go, and write my History, and work away merrily; and I will drink wine when I can afford it, and when I cannot, strong beer shall be the nectar—nothing like stingo! and if that were to fail too, laudanum is cheap; the Turks have found that out; and while there are poppies, no man need go to bed sober for want of his most gracious Majesty’s picture. And there will be a spare bed at my Domus,—mark you that, Grosvenor Bedford! and Tom’s cot into the bargain; and, from June till October, always a cold pie in the cupboard; and I have already got a kitten and a dog in remainder,—but that is a contingency; and you know there is the contingency of another house-animal, whom I already feel disposed to call whelp and dog, and all those vocables of vituperation by which a man loves to call those he loves best.
“Eblis’s angels sometimes go up to peep at the
table of fate, and then get knocked on the head with stars, as we see; only
foolish people such as we are mistake them for shooting stars. I should like
one
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 189 |
