THE KING COMPLAINS OF WANT OF SLEEP.
Nov. 1.—Our king does not advance in amendment; he grows so weak that he walks like a gouty man, yet has such spirits that he has talked away his voice, and is so hoarse it is painful to hear him. The queen is evidently in great uneasiness. God send him better!
She read to me to-day a lecture of Hunter’s. During the reading, twice, at pathetic passages, my poor queen shed tears. “How nervous I am?” she cried; “I am quite a fool! Don’t you think so?”
“No, ma’am,” was all I dared answer.
She revived, however, finished the lecture, and went upstairs and played upon the Princess Augusta’s harpsichord.
The king was hunting. Her anxiety for his return was greater than ever. The moment he arrived he sent a page to desire to have coffee and take his bark in the queen’s dressing-room. She said she would pour it out herself, and sent to inquire how he drank it.
The king is very sensible of the great change there is in himself, and of her disturbance at it. It seems, but heaven avert it! a threat of a total breaking up of the constitution. This, too, seems his own idea. I was present at his first seeing Lady Effingham on his return to Windsor this last time. “My dear Effy,” he cried, “you see me, all at once, an old man.” I was so much affected by this exclamation, that I wished to run out of the room. Yet I could not but recover when Lady Effingham, in her well-meaning but literal way, composedly answered, “We must all grow old, sir,—I am sure I do.”
He then produced a walking-stick which he had just ordered. “He could not,” he said, “get on without it; his strength seemed diminishing hourly.”
He took the bark, he said, “But the queen,” he cried, “is my physician, and no man need have a better; she is my friend, and no man can have a better.”