He was courageous and cheerful. In November, 1788, he wrote: "You kindly inquire after my health. I have not of late much reason to boast of it. People that will live a long life and drink to the bottom of the cup must expect to meet with some of the dregs. However, when I consider how many more terrible maladies the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I have only three incurable ones: the gout, the stone, and old age; and, those notwithstanding, I enjoy many comfortable intervals, in which I forget all my ills, and amuse myself in reading or writing, or in conversation with friends, joking, laughing, and telling merry stories, as when you first knew me, a young man about fifty."[101] He does not seem to have taken undue credit to himself; there is no querulousness, or egotism, or senility in his letters, but a delightful tranquillity of spirit. His sister wrote to him that the Boston newspapers often had matter in his honor. "I am obliged to them," he wrote; "on the other hand, some of our papers here are endeavoring to disgrace me. I take no notice. My friends defend me. I have long been accustomed to receive more blame, as well as more praise, than I have deserved. It is the lot of every public man, and I leave one account to balance the other." So serene was the aged philosopher, a _real_ philosopher, not one who, having played a part in life, was to be betrayed in the weakness and irritability of old age. He felt none of the mental weariness which years so often bring. He was by no means tired of life and affairs in this world, yet he wrote in a characteristic vein to the Bishop of St. Asaph: "The course of nature must soon put a period to my present mode of existence. This I shall submit to with the less regret, as, having seen during a long life a good deal of this world, I feel a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other." It was characteristic that in these closing days it was the progress of mankind in knowledge and welfare which especially absorbed his thoughts. When he reflected on the great strides that were making he said that he almost wished that it had been his destiny to be born two or three centuries later. He was one of the few men who has left on record his willingness to live his life over again, even though he should not be allowed the privilege of "correcting in the second edition the errors of the first." [Note 101: He habitually wrote in this vein; see, for example, _Works_, ix. 266, 283, and _passim_.]