Without some rest, I am gone.

I must, therefore, whenever I find the service will admit of it, request your permission to go to my friends, at Palermo, for a few weeks, and leave the command here to Commodore Troubridge.

Nothing but absolute necessity obliges me to write this letter." "I could no more stay fourteen days longer here, than fourteen years," he said in a private letter to Keith of the same date.
By the next day he had recognized that even he could not leave at once the task appointed him, without discredit.

"My situation," he then wrote to Hamilton, "is to me very irksome, but how at this moment to get rid of it is a great difficulty.

The French ships here ["Guillaume Tell" and others] are preparing for sea; the Brest fleet, Lord Keith says, may be daily expected, and with all this I am very unwell....
The first moment which offers with credit to myself I shall assuredly give you my company....