d so force him to fight or surrender. The scheme
was similar to that of the heights of St. Michel. It seemed desperate,
but so did all the rest; and if by chance it should succeed, the gain
was far greater than could follow any success below the town. Wolfe
embraced it at once.

Not that he saw much hope in it. He knew that every chance was against
him. Disappointment in the past and doom in the future, the pain and
exhaustion of disease, toils, and anxieties "too great," in the words of
Burke, "to be supported by a delicate constitution, and a body unequal
to the vigorous and enterprising soul that it lodged," threw him at
times into deep dejection. By those intimate with him he was heard to
say that he would not go back defeated, "to be exposed to the censure
and reproach of an ignorant populice." In other moods he felt that he
ought not to sacrifice what was left of his diminished army in vain
conflict with hopeless obstacles. But his final resolve once taken, he
would not swerve from it. His fear was that he might not be able to
lead his troops in person. "I know perfectly well you cannot cure me,"
he said to his physician; "but pray make me so that I may be without
pain for a few days, and able to do my duty: that is all I want."

In a despatch which Wolfe had written to Pitt, Admiral Saunders
conceived that he had ascribed to the fleet more than its just share in
the disaster at Montmorenci; and he sent him a letter on the subject.
Major Barre kept it from the invalid till the fever had abated. Wolfe
then wrote a long answer, which reveals his mixed dejection and resolve.
He owns the justice of what Saunders had said, but adds: "I cannot leave
out that part of my letter to Mr. Pitt which you object to. I am
sensible of my own errors in the course of the campaign, see clearly
wherein I have been deficient, and think a little more or less blame to
a man that must necessarily be ruined, of little or no consequences. I
take the blame of that unlucky day entirely upon my own shoulders, and I
expect to suffer for it." Then, speaking of the new project of an attack
above Quebec, he says despondingly: "My ill state of health prevents me
from executing my own plan; it is of too desperate a nature to order
others to execute." He proceeds, however, to give directions for it. "It
will be necessary to run as many small craft as possible above the town,
with provisions for six weeks, for about five thousand, which is all I
int