The earliest of these letters was written in the middle of July, 1835, when Shackford had gone to Portsmouth. It was a hasty shot fired after his departing friend to assure him of his affection, written under stress of headache from his brother’s office, and was followed the same day by a longer letter. “When I wrote to you this morning,” he says, “I was laboring under three very bad complaints enumerated in my other letter. I was then at my brother’s office. I am now at home, sitting by an open window, with my coat off, my stock do., with Coleridge’s works before me wherewith to consume the rest of the day, and also as cool as a cucumber. Shack, if you are a victim to any _other_ disease, and are lying tossing with pain under some physician’s prescription (such, for instance, as the pleasing draught concocted by Wm. Rufus, or the Red King, composed of the following truly delectable compounds, viz., ‘rue, tansy, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, and camomile flowers, farther enriched by a handful of earthworms, half a dozen wood lice and four centipedes’), if, I say, you labor under all these misfortunes, devoutly thank your more fav’ring stars, that you are not the yawning victim of ennui, a disease which Æsculapius himself couldn’t cure, and which I therefore humbly opine to have been the disease of Achilles.... I hope you’ll be amused with this epistle (if perchance you are able to read it). But the fact is I can’t write anything serious to save my life. Answer this the very day you get it....”