“My Dear Godwin,—I receive twice the pleasure from my recovery that it would have otherwise afforded, as it enables me to accept your kind invitation, which in this instance I might with perfect propriety and manliness thank you for, as an honour done to me. To sit at the same table with Grattan, who would not think it a memorable honour, a red-letter day in the almanac of his life? No one certainly who is in any degree worthy of it. Rather than not be in the same room, I could be well content to wait at the table at which I was not permitted to sit, and this not merely for Grattan’s undoubted great talents, and still less from any entire accordance with his political opinions, but because his great talents are the tools and vehicles of his genius, and all his speeches are attested by that constant accompaniment of true genius, a certain moral bearing, a moral dignity. His love of liberty has no snatch of the mob in it.
“Assure Mrs Godwin of my anxious wishes respecting her health. The scholar Salernitanus says:
“‘Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi
fias
Haec tria: mens hilaris, requies, moderata
diæta.’ |
“The regulated diet she already has, and now she must contrive to call in the two other doctors. . . . God bless you.
