Ixvi AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF 
have to explore the interior of Madagascar; with 
permission to visit Monomotapa, and the Sechelles 
Islands, &e. ; 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 interest 
as when I declined to go to Madagascar. I ought 
to have proceeded thither by all m<eans, and to have 
let the tertian ague take it& chance. My commission 
was a star of the first magnitudev It appeared 
after a long night of political darkness, which had 
presented 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which it has been so long and so unjustly withdrawn ; 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 na- 
tional 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 the time t 
