plan you have laid down will answer, and I do
not at present see the smallest occasion to accept your kind and
friendly offer of coming here.

P.S. 4.30 P.M. I enclose Mr. Crooks' letter to you. His account
to me of the pulse was that it was not strong, but quick and
beating near an hundred. One of the saline draughts which I have
taken since I wrote the foregoing letter, seems, as far as I can
judge from feeling, already to have had a very good effect.

Not until ten days later do we find signs of alarm in the letters of his
friends; for it is characteristic of his buoyant nature that he never
wrote despondingly about himself. There is a well-known story to the
effect that, on hearing the news of Austerlitz, he called for a map of
Europe, to see where the place was, and then said with a sigh: "Roll up
that map: it will not be wanted these ten years." One version assigns
the incident to Shockerwick House, near Bath. Pitt is looking over the
picture gallery, and is gazing at Gainsborough's portrait of the actor
Quin. His retentive memory calls up the lines in Churchill's
"Characters":

Nature, in spite of all his skill, crept in--
Horatio, Dorax, Falstaff--still 'twas Quin.

At that moment he hears the beat of a horse's hoofs. A courier dashes
up. He comes in, splashed with mud, hands the despatches. Pitt tears
them open and hurriedly reads them. His countenance changes, he calls
for brandy, then for a map, and is finally helped to his carriage,
uttering the historic phrase.[760] In another version he mournfully
rolls out the words to Lady Hester Stanhope, as she welcomes him in the
hall of Bowling Green House, after his last journey to his home on
Putney Heath.[761] The words probably fell from him on some occasion.
But at the risk of incurring the charge of pedantry, I must point out
that the news of Austerlitz did not come on him as one overwhelming
shock: it filtered through by degrees. As we have seen, he wrote to
Harrowby on 21st December, stating that reports from Berlin and other
quarters represented the sequel to the battle as a great success for the
Russians. It appears that Thornton, our envoy at Hamburg, wrote as
follows on 13th December to Mulgrave: "From everything I can learn (for
the details are even yet far from being circumstantial and decisive) the
tide of success had completely turned in favour of the Russian and
Austrian armies, tho', as the conflict still con