68 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



John Finlay * is to come back with him. I expect to be in London 

 about the middle or end of January, and I suppose Finlay will 

 come while I am there, and we may settle him comfortably. Wil- 

 son says, in speaking of some prize he means to undertake, that he 

 feels the vigor of his mind returning. God grant it ! If he will 

 promise to return happy, which I think he may do, from Scotland, 

 his going will be a blessed event ; but if he is to come away again 

 in the same miserable uncertainty, it will destroy the little calm he 

 has gained, and repeat the same sufferings with less strength to bear 

 them. I shall see him before he goes." 



Soon after this he was seized with a fit of illness, which caused 

 much concern to his affectionate correspondents, Blair and Findlay. 

 He quickly recovered, however; and his brother Andrew, then 

 serving at Chatham, on board H. M. S. " Magicienne," writes to 

 Robert on the 7th of December, " that he had found him in very 

 good health, but in very bad spirits." His own account of the 

 matter in a letter to Findlay, of December 10, 1804, is sufficiently 

 plain, and needs no comment : — 



"Though well when Andrew came here, as bad luck would have 

 it, I was taken ill before he left me, but not dangerously, and I am 

 rather better. I believe my complaint is nervous, and mortally 

 affects my spirits. I have a constant beating at my heart, and a 

 wavering of thought resembling a sort of derangement ; but I have 

 been bled and feel better. 



" This wretched complaint has been brought on by my late at- 

 tempt to bury in unbridled dissipation the recollection of blasted 

 hopes. But God's will be done." 



Between this date and the next letter, there is a gap of ten 

 months. Of what passed in the interval, there is no memorial be- 

 yond the allusions in his letter, from which we gather that he trav- 

 elled during the summer in the north of England and in Ireland ; 

 that a considerable portion of the holidays was spent among the 

 Lakes ; and that there and then he seized the opportunity offered 

 ( f becoming the proprietor of Elleray, one of the loveliest spots in 

 which a poet ever fixed his home. This letter is dated London, 

 October 3, 1805, and is written in a cheerful strain, yet betraying 



♦John Finlay, a young poet of great promise, author of Wallace, or the Vale of EllerMe ; 

 Historical and Romantic Ballads, etc. etc., was born in 17S2, and died at Moifat in 1S10. Wil- 

 son wrote an account of his life and writings in Blackwood for November. 1S17. 



