She replies:
"Bath, June 15th, 1783.
"I believe it is too true, my dear Sir, that you think on little except yourself and your own health, but then they are subjects on which every one else would think too—and that is a great consolation.
"I am willing enough to employ all my thoughts upon myself, but there is nobody here who wishes to think with or about me, so I am very sick and a little sullen, and disposed now and then to say, like king David, 'My lovers and my friends have been put away from me, and my acquaintance hid out of my sight.' If the last letter I wrote showed some degree of placid acquiescence in a situation, which, however displeasing, is the best I can get at just now, I pray God to keep me in that disposition, and to lay no more calamity upon me which may again tempt me to murmur and complain. In the meantime assure yourself of my undiminished kindness and veneration: they have been long out of accident's power either to lessen or increase."....
"That you should be solitary is a sad thing, and a strange one too, when every body is willing to drop in, and for a quarter of an hour at least, save you from a tête-à-tête with yourself. I never could catch a moment when you were alone whilst we were in London, and Miss Thrale says the same thing."
A few days afterwards, June 19th, he writes:
"I am sitting down in no cheerful solitude to write a narrative which would once have affected you with tenderness and sorrow, but which you will perhaps pass over now with the careless glance of frigid indifference. For this diminution of regard, however, I know not whether I ought to blame you, who may have reasons which I cannot know, and I do not blame myself, who have for a great part of human life done you what good I could, and have never done you evil."
Two days before, he had suffered a paralytic stroke, and lost the power of speech for a period. After minutely detailing his ailments and their treatment by his medical advisers, he proceeds:
"How this will be received by you I know not. I hope you will sympathise with me; but perhaps
"My mistress gracious, mild, and good,