202 THE LIFE OF JAMES D. FORBES. [CHAP. 



summer, they had travelled together in the Pyrenees. 

 Ever since they had kept up an affectionate intercourse 

 and correspondence. In the previous summer Forbes 

 had met Mackintosh at Kissingen, and had seen and 

 heard from himself how his health was failing. It is 

 thus Forbes writes of him in February 1851 : 



'EDINBURGH, February $th, 1851. 



* My dear friend John Mackintosh is dangerously ill. 

 I received a letter about ten days ago, dated from Tubin- 

 gen, the 21st January, kind and warm-hearted and 

 gentle, as he always was, yet evidently a little alarmed 

 about an increasing affection of the lungs, under which 

 he has suffered ever since his imprudent exposure and 

 fatigue in Italy, in May and June last year. This I 

 learned from him first at Kissingen, in June or July last, 

 but always under the seal of strict confidence not to alarm 

 his family. It was a sad mistake. The disease was 

 commenced and aggravated by imprudence ; and with the 

 characteristic unconsciousness of consumptive patients, 

 he had evidently no conception of actual danger even on 

 the 21st January. But on the 28th, his friend Mr. 

 Eostlin writes to a mutual friend, Mr. Nelson of New- 

 port, to break to his family the utterly unsuspected 

 tidings that he is rapidly sinking into the grave. How 

 strange, how appalling to us the ways of God ! Is it 

 because he is so pure, so good, so beloved, that he is to 

 be removed from the evil to come ? I wrote him a letter 

 to-day, full of unrestrained affection, in sad uncertainty 

 whether his living eye, which so often beamed with regard 

 towards me, will ever glance over it, or even his ear 

 catch the words when read : for I have written to his 

 mother to entreat that it may be read to him, if vjieces- 

 sary. I long to have an interest in the thoughts and 

 prayers of that dying saint for dying I fear he is/ 



To JOHN MACKINTOSH, ESQ. (Tubingen). 



'EDINBURGH, February 1851. 



c . . . No moderate distance, no dispensible en- 

 gagement, would have hindered me from going to 



