manner. "I am not impatient for their going in to the North. I hope they
have lost much of their provincial dialect."

And still, at any mention of his home or of those dearest to him, there
breaks involuntarily into his correspondence that longing, which would not
be repressed, for a sorely needed respite from labour and for the balm of
reunion with those he loved. There were, perhaps, few people to whom he
ventured to unburden himself as simply and spontaneously as he did to
Stanhope, a man linked to him by the tie of kinship, yet not so closely as
to make any such self-revelation on his part a possible selfishness. Thus
it is that this hitherto unpublished batch of his correspondence betrays
ever more and more, with a pathos of which the writer was obviously
unconscious, how the strain of watching and of loneliness was undermining
an indomitable brain and soul.

Collingwood's existence, indeed, alternated between an eternal racking
anxiety and a monotony before which the imagination sinks appalled.
"Between days and nights I am almost wore out," he wrote briefly to
Stanhope on April 29th, 1806, "but I do not mean to quit my station while
I have health"; and on September 26th of that same year, after writing an
account of the situation in which he finds himself, he exclaims abruptly,
"It is the dullest life that can be conceived and nothing but the utmost
patience can endure it!" During long months of blockading, dawn after dawn
arose to reveal to his weary gaze the same boundless expanse of rocking
ocean, which he had well-nigh learnt to hate; the same restricted space of
deck to traverse; the same routine of action to contemplate; the same type
of food further to nauseate a reluctant appetite; the same complete lack
of mental and physical relaxation, which is, in itself, almost an
essential to sanity. Thus, soon, to the tension of that perpetual
guardianship was added the haunting dread that an existence which was