A variety of unpropitious circumstances gave rise to my journey to the East Indies, while domestic calamity marked my departure, and, at the very outset, gave me a foretaste of those miseries which Fate had reserved to let fall upon me in the sequel. The channels from which I drew the means of supporting my family in that style which their rank and connections obliged them to maintain, were clogged by a coincidence of events as unlucky as unexpected: the War in India had interrupted the regular remittance of my property from thence: a severe shock which unbounded generosity and beneficence had given to the affairs of my father, rendered him incapable of maintaining his usual punctuality in the payment of the income he had assigned me; and, to crown the whole, I had been deprived, by death, of two lovely children (your brother and sister), whom I loved not less than I have since loved you and your brother.
It was under the pressure of those accumulated afflictions, aggravated by the goading thought of leaving my family for such a length of time as must necessarily elapse before I could again see them, that I set out for India in the month of May, in the year 1781, with a heart overwhelmed with woe, and too surely predictive of misfortunes.
From the gloomy cave of depression in which my mind was sunk, I looked forward, to seek, in the future, a gleam of comfort——but in vain: not a ray appeared——Melancholy had thrown her sombre shadow on the whole. Even present affliction yielded up a share of my heart to an unaccountable dismal presentiment of future ill; and the disasters and disappointments I had passed, were lost and forgotten in ominous forebodings and instinctive presages of those that were to come.
Of all the weaknesses to which the human mind is subject, superstition is that against which I would have you guard with the utmost vigilance. It is the most incurable canker of the mind. Under its unrelenting dominion, happiness withers, the understanding becomes obscured, and every principle of joy is blasted. For this reason I wish to account for those presages, by referring them to their true physical causes, in order thereby to prevent your young mind from receiving, from what I have written, any injurious impression, or superstitious idea of presentiment, as it is fashionably denominated.
If the mind of Man be examined, it will be found naturally prone to the contemplation of the future——its flights from hope to hope, or fear to fear, leading it insensibly from objects present and in possession, to those remote and in expectation——from positive good to suppositious better, or from actual melancholy to imaginary misfortune. In these cases, the mind never fails to see the prospect in colours derived from the medium through which it is viewed and exaggerated by the magnifying power of fancy. Thus my mind, labouring under all the uneasiness I have described, saw every thing through the gloomy medium of melancholy, and, looking forward, foreboded nothing but misfortune: accident afterwards fulfilled those forebodings; but accident, nay, the most trifling change of circumstances, might possibly have so totally changed the face of my subsequent progress, that good fortune, instead of misadventure, might have been my lot, and so all my foreboding been as illusory and fallible as all such phantoms of the imagination really are. Thus I argue now——and I am sure I argue truly; but if reason be not timely called in, and made, as it were, an habitual inmate, it avails but little against the overbearing force of superstition, who, when she once gets possession of the mind, holds her seat with unrelenting tenacity, and, calling in a whole host of horrors, with despair at their head, to her aid, entrenches herself behind their formidable powers, and bids defiance to the assaults of reason.
Thus it fared with me——Under the dominion of gloomy presentiment, I left London; and my journey down to Margate, where I was to take shipping, was, as Shakspeare emphatically says, “a phantasm, or a hideous dream——and my little state of Man suffered, as it were, the nature of an insurrection:”——the chaos within me forbade even the approach of discriminate reflection; and I found myself on board the Packet, bound to Ostend, without having a single trace left upon my mind, of the intermediate stages and incidents, that happened since I had left London.
It has been observed——and I wish you always to carry it in memory, as one of the best consolations under affliction——that human sufferings, like all other things, find their vital principle exhausted, and their extinction accelerated, by overgrowth; and that, at the moment when Man thinks himself most miserable, a benignant Providence is preparing relief, in some form or other, for him. So it, in some sort, happened with me; for I was fortunate enough to find in the Packet a fellow-passenger, whose valuable conversation and agreeable manners beguiled me insensibly of the gloomy contemplation in which I was absorbed, and afforded my tortured mind a temporary suspension of pain. This Gentleman was General Lockhart: he was going to Brussels, to pay his court to the Emperor Joseph the Second, who was then shortly expected in the Low Countries, in order to go through the ceremonies of his Inauguration. As Brussels lay in my way, I was flattered with the hopes of having for a companion a Gentleman at once so pleasing in his manners and respectable in his character, and was much comforted when I found him as much disposed as myself to an agreement to travel the whole of the way thither together. Thus, though far, very far from a state of ease, I was, when landing at Ostend, at least less miserable than at my coming on board the Packet.
As this Letter is already spun to a length too great to admit of any material part of the description I am now to give you of Ostend, and the Country to which it belongs, I think it better to postpone it to my next, which I mean to devote entirely to that subject, and thereby avoid the confusion that arises from mixing two subjects in the same Letter, or breaking off the thread of one in order to make way for the other.
Adieu, my dear boy!——Forget not your brother John. That you may both be good and happy, is all the wish now left to, &c.