"My eyesight fails me most dreadfully," he writes to his old friend Davison.

"I firmly believe that, in a very few years, I shall be stone-blind.

It is this only, of all my maladies, that makes me unhappy; but God's will be done." The first winter was unusually severe, and during it was added, to his official cares and personal suffering, an extreme anxiety about Lady Hamilton, for he was expecting the birth of a second child in January.

This child, a girl, lived but a short time; he never saw her.

The effect of these various causes upon his health was so great, that the physicians, as early as January, 1804, were advising his return.