Ixvi ' AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF 
have to explore the interior of Madagascar; with 
permission to visit Monomotapa, and the Sechelles 
Islands, &c. ; and that a man-of-war would take me 
out early in October following. This was in the 
month of May, 1813. The ague still annoying me 
cruelly, I wrote to Lord Bathurst, and begged to 
resign the commission. 
Horace once condemned himself for running 
away, —“relicta non bene parmula.” It was for 
me to have condemned myself too on this occasion ; 
for I never acted so much against my own in- 
terest as when I declined to go to Madagascar. 
I ought to have proceeded thither by all means, 
and to have let the tertian ague take its chance. 
My commission was a star of the first magnitude. 
It appeared after a long night of political darkness, 
which had prevented the family from journeying 
onwards for the space of nearly three centuries. I can 
fancy that it beckoned to me, and that a voice from 
it said, * Come and serve your country; come and 
restore your family name to the national calendar, 
from which it has been so long and so unjustly 
withdrawn; come, and show to the world that 
conscience, and not crime, has hitherto been the 
cause of your being kept in the background; come 
into the national dockyard, and refit your shattered 
bark, which has been cast on a lee-shore, where 
merciless wreck-seekers have plundered its stores, 
and where the patriots of yesterday have looked 
down upon it with scorn and ‘contempt, and have 
pronounced it unworthy to bear its country’s flag.” 
I ought to have listened to this supposed adviser at 
