200 TO [JAMES]

[1741]

Your letter refreshed me like a shower after a drought. I thought you had been in foreign lands, but am glad to find you have been so long in England, and your health not the worse for it. Give me leave to reckon it at least among the possibilities, that you may sometime or other come to Bath, and from thence take it in your head to make a short trajet to our coast, where you will find me with a wife, three sons, and a daughter--of starlike beauty--rejoicing literally under our fig-trees.

Your patriots surely are the most profound or the most stupid of politicians. Why they should freely and with open eyes make such a step seems a most inexplicable riddle. I have long wished well to the public, but my wishes have been so often disappointed,

that public affairs are grown more my amusement than concern. But news will alwaies be entertaining.

'Stultorum regum et populorum continet æstus.'

I thank you for what you told me. What you sent was very agreeable, as, indeed, a line from you always will be. Here we have no news; but this, in all this province of Munster great devastations are made by bloody fluxes, fevers, and want, which carry off more than a civil war.

Our well-bred friend whom you call the Abbé acts a becoming part; I wish we had many more such Abbés among his brethren. Mr. Dalton, who I expected was abroad with you, is, it seems, made happy the third time (O terque quaterque beatus); I wish you would once [marry to have that natural comfort of children] dare to do what he does so often. Without that expedient you will lose the comforts of domestic life, that natural refuge from solitude and years which is to be found in wife and children. Mine are to me a great joy [the chief of the good things of this world], and alone capable of making a life tolerable--so much embittered by sickness as mine has been for several years. I had many symptoms of the stone, and for a long time suspected my... cholic to be an effect thereof. But of late I am satisfied that it is a scorbutic cholic, and that my original disease is the scurvy.