The law cannot be accused of having encroached seriously on time that would have been else devoted to literature. He took long vacations, when the hated text-book and the detestable reports were banished entirely from his mind. Speaking of his residence at Westbury, he says, "it was one of the happiest portions of his life: he had never before or since produced so much poetry in the same space of time." But still the profession hung over him, urging, from time to time, its distracting obligations. Having escaped from the smoke of London, he now attributes his shattered nerves to the climate of England. But it was as little the climate of England, which his constitution afterwards endured very well in the cold and rainy regions of Cumberland, as it was any fair amount of intellectual labour, that was undermining his health. It was the sense of an _unperformed_ task, and that compulsory and distracted attention, one half hour of which more tries and fatigues the brain than a whole morning spent in willing harmonious effort. Bearing these observations in mind, the following letter will be read with peculiar interest:-- "TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD, ESQ. _Kingsdown, Bristol, Dec. 21, 1799._ Grosvenor--I think seriously of going abroad. My complaint--so I am told by the opinion of many medical men--is wholly a diseased sensibility, (mind you, physical sensibility,) disordering the functions, now of the heart, now of the intestines, and gradually debilitating me. Climate is the obvious remedy. In my present state, to attempt to undergo the confinement of legal application were actual suicide. I am anxious to be well, and to attempt the profession: _much_ in it I shall never do: sometimes my principles stand in the way, sometimes the want of readiness, which I felt from the first--a want which I always know in company, and never in solitude and silence. Howbeit I will make the attempt; but mark you, if by stage-writing, or any other writing, I can acquire independence, I will not make the sacrifice of happiness it will inevitably cost me. I love the country, I love study--devotedly I love it; but in legal studies it is only the subtlety of the mind that is exercised. * * * * * I am not indolent; I loath indolence; but, indeed, reading law is laborious indolence--it is thrashing straw. I have read, and read, and read; but the devil a bit can I remember. I have given all possible attention, and attempted to command volition. No! The eye read, the lips pronounced, I understood and re-read it; it was very clear; I remembered the page, the sentence--but close the book, and all was gone!