‘My dear Lord,—What can I say to you? How can I express to you my sense of your great kindness? I can only thank you in the fulness of my heart, and assure you how much I lament your long illness—so severe an affliction to your friends and such a loss to the world.
‘As for myself, I am going on, I believe, as well as I can expect, being at length promoted from my bed to a chair; and if this is to be my last promotion, I shall endeavour to console myself, as Galileo is said to have done under a heavier dispensation—“It has pleased God that I should be blind; and ought not I to be pleased?”
‘Pray remember me most particularly to Mrs. Blomfield, and believe me to be
