undertaking, I went into the country, in a very weak and
deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a
jaundice, a dropsy, and an asthma, altogether uniting their
forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated that it
had lost all its muscular flesh. Mine was now no longer what was
called a Bath case; nor, if it had been so, had I strength
remaining sufficient to go thither, a ride of six miles only
being attended with an intolerable fatigue. I now discharged my
lodgings at Bath, which I had hitherto kept. I began in earnest
to look on my case as desperate, and I had vanity enough to rank
myself with those heroes who, of old times, became voluntary
sacrifices to the good of the public. But, lest the reader
should be too eager to catch at the word VANITY, and should be
unwilling to indulge me with so sublime a gratification, for I
think he is not too apt to gratify me, I will take my key a pitch
lower, and will frankly own that I had a stronger motive than the
love of the public to push me on: I will therefore confess to
him that my private affairs at the beginning of the winter had
but a gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public or the
poor of those sums which men, who are always ready to plunder
both as much as they can, have been pleased to suspect me of
taking: on the contrary, by composing, instead of inflaming the
quarrels of porters and beggars (which I blush when I say hath
not been universally practiced), and by refusing to take a
shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had
another left, I had reduced an income of about five hundred
pounds[13] a-year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more
than three hundred pounds; a considerable proportion of which
remained with my clerk; and, indeed, if the whole had done so, as
it ought, he would be but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen