Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/140

 will be familiar to all readers of Gronow as another of the extravagant men of fashion who died on foreign soil—to mortal combat at tennis. They met in fight in March 1840 and Raikes was a witness of the struggle. But now poor Davies was ill. The influenza, in the familiar language of that game, had "added half 15 to my years and taken away from my play half 30." He was coming to Paris, would show Miss Raikes "a French translation of Manfred of which I possess the copyright, and which should she declare it to possess such merit as I am informed it does I intend to publish, together with some other writings about which I have no alarm."

A second letter in the spring of 1838 records "a second attack of the grippe which had left him more dead than alive." He had discovered, but the truth came home to him somewhat too late in life "that a man can live on very little." For nearly six months he had never but once "drank more than one bottle of weak Bordeaux per diem. This I solemnly declare. I have surprised myself." He now had "impudence for a dinner-party and within a week he intended to be in Paris to get one." Indeed the French translation of Manfred "is already packed up in my trunk" and there it seems to have remained. (Raikes, private correspondence, pp. 70—83). In September 1840 Davies wrote to Raikes from the Hotel d'Angleterre at Abbeville. His companion was a volume of Burke, and he was on his way to St. Germain where he intended "to pass four or five days before taking an apartment in Paris." Meantime he purposed visiting Dieppe for two or three days and then proceeding to Rouen to gratify his tastes as a gourmet. "The table d'hôte at Rouen is admirable. There are objections to all but fewer to that at Rouen than to any I ever knew." His chief reason for this praise was not complimentary to his