eftain, admired by Voltaire, could have been no
ordinary man.'

[461] This extraordinary young man, whom I had the pleasure of knowing
intimately, having been deeply regretted by his country, the most minute
particulars concerning him must be interesting to many. I shall
therefore insert his two last letters to his mother, Lady Margaret
Macdonald, which her ladyship has been pleased to communicate to me.
'Rome, July 9th, 1766. 'My DEAR MOTHER, 'Yesterday's post brought me
your answer to the first letter in which I acquainted you of my illness.
Your tenderness and concern upon that account are the same I have always
experienced, and to which I have often owed my life. Indeed it never was
in so great danger as it has been lately; and though it would have been
a very great comfort to me to have had you near me, yet perhaps I ought
to rejoice, on your account, that you had not the pain of such a
spectacle. I have been now a week in Rome, and wish I could continue to
give you the same good accounts of my recovery as I did in my last; but
I must own that, for three days past, I have been in a very weak and
miserable state, which however seems to give no uneasiness to my
physician. My stomach has been greatly out of order, without any visible
cause; and the palpitation does not decrease. I am told that my stomach
will soon recover its tone, and that the palpitation must cease in time.
So I am willing to believe; and with this hope support the little
remains of spirits which I can be supposed to have, on the forty-seventh
day of such an illness. Do not imagine I have relapsed;--I only recover
slower than I expected. If my letter is shorter than usual, the cause of
it is a dose of physick, which has weakened me so much to-day, that I am
not able to write a long letter. I will make up for it next post, and
remain always 'Your most sincerely affectionate son, 'J. MACDONALD.' He
grew gradually worse; and on the night before his death he wrote as
follows from Frescati:--'MY DEAR MOTHER, 'Though I did not mean to
deceive you in my last letter from Rome, yet certainly you would have
very little reason to conclude of the very great and constant danger I
have gone through ever since that time. My life, which is still almost
entirely desperate, did not at that time appear to me so, otherwise I
should have represented, in its true colours, a fact which acquires very
little horror by that means, and comes with redoubled force by
deception.