August 16.  ’Better I hope, and better.  My respiration gets more and more ease and liberty.  I went to church yesterday, after a very liberal dinner, without any inconvenience; it is indeed no long walk, but I never walked it without difficulty, since I came, before.—­the intention was only to overpower the seeming vis inertioe of the pectoral and pulmonary muscles.  I am favoured with a degree of ease that very much delights me, and do not despair of another race upon the stairs of the Academy[1100].  If I were, however, of a humour to see, or to shew the state of my body, on the dark side, I might say,

     "Quid te exempta juvat spinis de pluribus una[1101]?"

The nights are still sleepless, and the water rises, though it does not rise very fast.  Let us, however, rejoice in all the good that we have.  The remission of one disease will enable nature to combat the rest.  The squills I have not neglected; for I have taken more than a hundred drops a day, and one day took two hundred and fifty, which, according to the popular equivalence of a drop to a grain, is more than half an ounce.  I thank you, dear Sir, for your attention in ordering the medicines; your attention to me has never failed.  If the virtue of medicines could be enforced by the benevolence of the prescriber, how soon should I be well.’

August 19.  ’The relaxation of the asthma still continues, yet I do not trust it wholly to itself, but soothe it now and then with an opiate.  I not only perform the perpetual act of respiration with less labour, but I can walk with fewer intervals of rest, and with greater freedom of motion.  I never thought well of Dr. James’s compounded medicines[1102]; his ingredients appeared to me sometimes inefficacious and trifling, and sometimes heterogeneous and destructive of each other.  This prescription exhibits a composition of about three hundred and thirty grains, in which there are four grains of emetick tartar, and six drops [of] thebaick tincture.  He that writes thus, surely writes for show.  The basis of his medicine is the gum ammoniacum, which dear Dr. Lawrence used to give, but of which I never saw any effect.  We will, if you please, let this medicine alone.  The squills have every suffrage, and in the squills we will rest for the present.’

August 21.  ’The kindness which you shew by having me in your thoughts upon all occasions, will, I hope, always fill my heart with gratitude.  Be pleased to return my thanks to Sir George Baker[1103], for the consideration which he has bestowed upon me.  Is this the balloon that has been so long expected, this balloon to which I subscribed, but without payment[1104]?  It is pity that philosophers have been disappointed, and shame that they have been cheated; but I know not well how to prevent either.  Of this experiment I have read nothing; where was it exhibited? and who was the man that ran away with so much money?  Continue, dear Sir, to write often and more at a time; for none of your prescriptions operate to their proper uses more certainly than your letters operate as cordials.’