The anxiety the General suffered during the winter of 1779 aggravated a complaint from which he had been suffering for some time, which he describes in his diary as "a stubborn disease which no medicine can allay," and he began to feel that rest and change were necessary. So he applied for, and obtained, leave of absence to go home for the benefit of the Bath waters; but so reluctant was he to leave his post that it was late in the autumn of 1780, before he actually sailed. During the few months immediately preceding his departure his correspondence is a mixture of explanations to the authorities at home of the reasons for his return, and entreaties to his officers to write to him at Bath, and keep him posted in all the news of the war. During the three years of his command he had got everything into such admirable order, that its transfer to his successor was simpler than could have been expected from its complicated and extensive nature. He received a perfect ovation on his departure, both from the civil and military part of the population; and the dear old man had hardly sat down in Bath, before he wrote off to all his old friends of the 4th Battalion. In all that General Pattison did—whether on duty or not—he was essentially conscientious and hard-working. And these are the two qualities which rule the world. George Macdonald—in his lecture on Milton—said that on rising from a study of the poet's works, he felt that he had been gazing on one who was, in every noble sense of the word, _a man_. And the student of General Pattison's letters and orders feels also, in quitting the dusty tomes and faded letters, that he has been conversing with a true, a noble man. A brief notice of his death will suitably close this chapter. He lived to be a very old man. Twice he was appointed Commandant of Woolwich, a command less onerous than that which he held in America, but still a prize to which every Artillery officer looks forward. At last on a March morning in the year 1805, that stubborn disease which indeed no medicine can allay, that old, old disease, death, stole into Hill Street, Berkeley Square, and touched on the shoulder, in his 82nd year, the gallant old soldier, a chapter in whose life has just been alluded to.