"In the autumn Lord Chatham's health grew stronger. Judging from the event, we may conclude that the morbid humours had begun to leave his nerves, and to concentrate for a fit--so long intermitted and so much needed--of his hereditary gout. He was still entirely shut out from his friends, and still unable to transact any business, but he could bear to hear it mentioned, and could form some judgment of its tenor. In this situation his mind, not yet restored to its full vigour, brooded over suspicions and discontents, for which the behaviour of his colleagues afforded him no just foundation."[109] Lord Chatham now resigned the Privy Seal (October, 1768), which he had held since July, 1766. "Until towards the middle of March, 1767, he had been truly and in effect Prime Minister; since that time he had been--_nothing_." Lord Chatham's derangement was, however, at last dispelled. We find that "a few weeks only after Lord Chatham's resignation, his gout, so long interrupted, but for some time past giving symptoms of approach, returned. Bowed down as he was by a far more grievous malady, it proved to him a healing visitation. It raised his drooping spirits and strung his feeble nerves. The clouds which had obscured that great intellect wholly passed away. Never indeed did his splendid eloquence or his wise and resolute counsels shine forth more brightly than during the next following years." It was in the year 1775 (November 29) that, on the American war question, Lord Chatham emerged from his retirement--a year after the Lunacy Act had passed.