r the more extraordinary to those who recollect
the outrages with which it began. Having thus fully accomplished my
undertaking, I went into the country, in a very weak and deplorable
condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and
an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body
so entirely emaciated that it had lost all its muscular flesh. Mine was
now no longer what was called a Bath case; nor, if it had been so, had
I strength remaining sufficient to go thither, a ride of six miles only
being attended with an intolerable fatigue. I now discharged my lodgings
at Bath, which I had hitherto kept. I began in earnest to look on my
case as desperate, and I had vanity enough to rank myself with those
heroes who, of old times, became voluntary sacrifices to the good of the
public. But, lest the reader should be too eager to catch at the
word VANITY, and should be unwilling to indulge me with so sublime a
gratification, for I think he is not too apt to gratify me, I will take
my key a pitch lower, and will frankly own that I had a stronger motive
than the love of the public to push me on: I will therefore confess to
him that my private affairs at the beginning of the winter had but a
gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public or the poor of those
sums which men, who are always ready to plunder both as much as they
can, have been pleased to suspect me of taking: on the contrary, by
composing, instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars
(which I blush when I say hath not been universally practiced), and by
refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not
have had another left, I had reduced an income of about five hundred
pounds [13] a-year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than
three hundred pounds; a considerable proportion of which remained with
my clerk; and, indeed, if the whole had done so, as it ought, he would
be but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty-four in
the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous air in the universe, and which
hath in his case corrupted a good constitution without contaminating his
morals.

[Footnote 13: A predecessor of mine used to boast that he made one thousand
pounds a-year in his office; but how he did this (if indeed he did it)
is to me a secret. His clerk, now mine, told me I had more business than
he had ever known there; I am sure I had as much as any man could do.
T