245 



must assist me, and if I can succeed in a similar request to another 

 friend, I shall trouble you with the packet to the worthy baronet." 



" Accept, my dear friend, of the enclosed, as the 

 truest mark of a confirmed esteem ; and believe me when I tell 

 you I think I pay my own heart one of the highest compliments 

 when I say it is filled with the warmest sentiments towards you; 

 and that they will continue during our separation. Take with 

 you my warmest wishes for the perfect restoration of your health, 

 and happy meeting with all those you respect and love in our 

 native country. 



" I trust, my worthy friend, it will not be long before I follow 

 your example. Your sentiments have always coincided with my 

 own as to the proper period of leaving India. Long have I firmly 

 fixed that period in my own mind ; and now, as the time ap- 

 proaches, did I not carry my intentions into execution, I should 

 degrade myself in my own opinion, for want of that firmness and 

 resolution, which I think not to possess is a disgrace to the human 

 character. Was my fortune collected and advantageously remit- 

 ted to England, I should now have fully sufficient for a man of 

 my disposition, who courts the shade of retirement, and has no 

 taste for fashionable dissipation, or ostentatious vanity. 1 should 

 be able to gratify every wish of my heart; and wealth, accumu- 

 lated for any other purpose than the promotion of happiness, I 

 hold in sovereign contempt. I am most sincerely concerned when 

 I see some of my very particular friends, at the expense of their 

 constitutions, heaping up riches, far beyond what their own occa- 

 sions can ever require. This disposition I cannot but regard as a 



