The two latter, the one on account of his age, the other from his
health breaking down, he sent back to England from Gibraltar.
Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he describes as "full of
Quakers and salt fish," he despatched letters to his mother, Drury, and
Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods of his mind. Smarting under a
slight he had received at parting from a school-companion, who had excused
himself from a farewell meeting on the plea that he had to go shopping, he
at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, "leaving England
without regret," he has thought of entering the Turkish service; in the
next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of
boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet, by which he was
bound, sailed for Lisbon and arrived there about the middle of the month,
when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his
stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate
dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time
rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political
assassinations.
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