cumstances, thinks differently. He tells Malone that there is much curious and interesting matter in the collection. But the critic, to his great regret, received no invitation, then or afterward, from the owner of Knowle, to examine either letters or papers.[1]
A whim seized him about this time (1802) to change his diet. Severe dyspepsia, which so often haunts the steps and dashes the triumphs of genius and study, induced him to forsake solids for soups, broths, gruel, and similar fare. The success of the scheme, as may be supposed, was not great; but the economy, had that been an object, considerable. “I” have been living,” he writes to his sister, Jan. 1803, “upon nothing for a good while past. My butcher’s bill for this whole year comes to but thirty-three pounds, and of that only seven guineas have been spent since July.”
Soon afterward he unexpectedly failed in securing a public appointment, without disturbance of his usual constitutional equanimity. The office had become vacant by death; his succession to it was promised and said to be certain; till just on the point of being inducted, it was discovered to be not in the gift of the nobleman who claimed the patronage, but in that of Lord Hawkesbury. "Lord Pelham,” he writes to his sister, “would unquestionably have had the disposal of it had not his predecessor, the Duke of Portland, granted the reversion of the first clerkship of the Signet that should fall, which took place on Fraser’s
- ↑ A hint in the letter to Mr. Windham from Paris plainly shows that his lordship was not easy in his communications with Napoleon—“and the sooner I am relieved from this place the better.”
