THE DOCTOR’S WAY OF LIFE.
From the time of this happy return, the Memorialist passed at Chelsea College every moment that she could tear from personal calls that, most unopportunely yet imperiously, then demanded her attention.
Shut up nevertheless, as the Doctor was now from the general world and its commerce, the seclusion of his person was by no means attended with any seclusion of kindness; or any exemption from what he deemed a parental devoir.
When, on the 12th day of the following year, 1813, his returned daughter, though her first enjoyment was her restoration to his society, excused herself from accompanying her son to the College; and the Doctor gathered that that day, the 6th of January, and the anniversary of the lamented loss of their mutual darling, Susanna, had been yearly devoted, since that privation, to meditative commemoration; he sent his confidential housekeeper to the Memorialist’s apartment with the following lines:
“Few individuals have lost more valuable friends than myself,—Twining, Crisp, poor Bewley, Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds—If I were to keep an anniversary for all these severally, I should not have time allowed me for diminishing the first excess of my affliction for each.”
It may, perhaps, be superfluous, and yet seems unavoidable to mention, that again, as after the death of Mr. Crisp, she hastened to him with her grateful acknowledgments for this exhortation; and that she has ever since refused herself that stated sad indulgence.
Still, also, the epistolary pen of the Doctor not only retained its kind, but kept alive its fanciful flow; as witness the following extract from a letter, written in his eighty-seventh year, three months later than the date of the last copied billet, and in answer to a letter from the Memorialist, written during a visit to Mrs. Locke, senior, at Norbury Park;
“Chelsea College, April, 1813.
“Why, my dear F. B. d’Arblay! what a happy effect has the kindness of your dear, accomplished, and elegant friend, Mrs. Locke, produced! She has poured balm into all your mental wounds, and healed every sore, which, having had no leonine tincture of March in it, now only breathes zephyrs, and the comforts of Favonius; after your anxiety for the success of Alexander’s election[94], your own feeble state of health, and your uneasiness at the alarming silence of your kind and worthy husband.
“I thought the weather was about to mend its manners! but to-day it has been more wet and blustering than for some time past. For the rain, however, as April is begun, it is to be hoped it will bring forth May flowers: and as to the fury of the wind, it seems to have purified the air of its noxious vapours, which have been supposed to have produced the symptoms of influenza.”
&c. &c.