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 52 Prayers and Meditations.

for her to have seen it with me 1. But with respect to her no rational wish is now left, but that we may meet at last where the mercy of God shall make us happy, and perhaps make us instrumental to the happiness of each other. It is now eighteen years.

84. 1 770, April 1 1. Cupped 2.

85.

1770, April \.

This week is Passion week.

I have for some weeks past been much afflicted with the Lumbago, or Rheumatism in the Loins, which often passes to the muscles of the belly, where it causes equal, if not greater pain. In the day the sunshine mitigates it, and in cold or cloudy weather such as has for some time past remarkably prevailed the heat of a strong fire suspends it. In the night it is so trouble some, as not very easily to be borne. I lye wrapped in Flannel with a very great fire near my bed, but whether it be that a recumbent posture encreases the pain, or that expansion by moderate warmth excites what a great heat dissipates, I can seldom remain in bed two hours at a time without the necessity of rising to heat the parts affected at the fire.

One night, between the pain and the spasms in my stomach I was insupportably distressed. On the next night, I think, I laid a blister to my back, and took opium ; my night was tolerable, and from that time the spasms in my stomach which disturbed me for many years, and for two past harassed me almost to distraction, have nearly ceased ; I suppose the breast is relaxed by the opium.

Having passed Thursday in Passion Week at Mr. Thrales 3 ,

1 Johnson visited Brighton in 1765 Goethe was thirty-seven years old

(Letters, i. 120) when he was fifty- six when he first saw the sea. It was at

years old. This seems to have been Venice. Lewes's Life of Goethe, ed.

his first sight of the sea. His wife 1890, p. 297.

had never seen it. ' George III had 2 For his recourse to bleeding, see

never seen the sea, nor ever been Life, iii. 152, n. 3.

thirty miles from London at the age 3 At Mr. Thrale's house in South-

of thirty-four.' Walpole's Memoirs wark. of the Reign of George III, iv. 327.

I came

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