After a month's travel in the most severe weather I ever experienced, I arrived here on the 20th of February. The weather has since been fine. My brother and friend, who is likewise my physician, accompanied me; but he is so satisfied with my improvement, as to be able to leave me for Corfu; but he is within a week's call.
I have no society here, except that of the amiable Vice-Legate, who is the Governor of the Province; but this is enough for me, for as yet I can bear but little conversation. I ride in the pine forest, which is the most magnificent in Europe, and which I wish you could see. You know the trees by Claude Lorraine's landscapes: imagine a circle of twenty miles of these great fan-shaped pines, green sunny lawns, and little knolls of underwood, with large junipers of the Adriatic in front, and the Apennines still covered with snow behind. The pine wood partly covers the spot where the Roman fleet once rode,--such is the change of time!
It is my intention to stay here till the beginning of April, and then to go to the Alps, for I must avoid the extremes of heat and cold.
God bless you, my dear Poole. I am always your old and sincere friend,
Feeling that his recovery was tardy, and that perfect mental repose was more than ever necessary for its advancement, he determined to resign the chair of the Royal Society; and he accordingly announced that intention, by a letter to his friend Mr. Davies Gilbert, Vice-President of the Society.
TO DAVIES GILBERT, ESQ. M.P. V.P.R.S. &c. &c.
Yesterday, on my arrival here, I found your two letters. I am sorry I did not receive the one you were so good as to address to me at Ravenna; nor can I account for its miscarriage. I commissioned a friend there to transmit to me my letters from that place after my departure, and I received several, even so late as the middle of May, at Laybach, which had been sent to Italy, and afterwards to Illyria. I did not write to you again, because I always entertained hopes of being able to give a better account of the state of my health. I am sorry to say the expectations of my physicians of a complete and rapid recovery have not been realized. I have gained ground, under the most favourable circumstances, very slowly; and though I have had no new attack, and have regained, to a certain extent, the use of my limbs, yet the tendency of the system to accumulate blood in the head still continues, and I am obliged to counteract it by a most rigid vegetable diet, and by frequent bleedings with leeches and blisterings, which of course keep me very low. From my youth up to last year, I had suffered, more or less, from a slight hemorrhoidal affection; and the fulness of the vessels, then only a slight inconvenience, becomes a serious and dangerous evil in the head, to which it seems to have been transferred. I am far from despairing of an ultimate recovery, but it must be a work of time, and the vessels which have been over distended only very slowly regain their former dimensions and tone: and for my recovery, not only diet and regimen and physical discipline, but a freedom from anxiety, and from all business and all intellectual exertion, is absolutely required.