"Really and truly, I want you to make a great hit, if only out of self-love, because we happen to be old cronies; and I have no doubt you will--I am sure you _can_. But you are, I'll be sworn, in a devil of a pucker; and _I_ am not at your elbow, and Rogers _is_. I envy him; which is not fair, because he does not envy any body. Mind you send to me--that is, make Murray send--the moment you are forth. "I have been very ill with a slow fever, which at last took to flying, and became as quick as need be.[131] But, at length, after a week of half-delirium, burning skin, thirst, hot headach, horrible pulsation, and no sleep, by the blessing of barley water, and refusing to see any physician, I recovered. It is an epidemic of the place, which is annual, and visits strangers. Here follow some versicles, which I made one sleepless night. "I read the 'Christabel;' Very well: I read the 'Missionary;' Pretty--very: I tried at 'Ilderim;' Ahem; I read a sheet of 'Marg'ret of _Anjou_;' _Can you_? I turn'd a page of * *'s 'Waterloo;' Pooh! pooh! I look'd at Wordsworth's milk-white 'Rylstone Doe:' Hillo! &c. &c. &c. "I have not the least idea where I am going, nor what I am to do. I wished to have gone to Rome; but at present it is pestilent with English,--a parcel of staring boobies, who go about gaping and wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent. A man is a fool who travels now in France or Italy, till this tribe of wretches is swept home again. In two or three years the first rush will be over, and the Continent will be roomy and agreeable. "I stayed at Venice chiefly because it is not one of their 'dens of thieves;' and here they but pause and pass. In Switzerland it was really noxious. Luckily, I was early, and had got the prettiest place on all the Lake before they were quickened into motion with the rest of the reptiles. But they crossed me every where. I met a family of children and old women half-way up the Wengen Alp (by the Jungfrau) upon mules, some of them too old and others too young to be the least aware of what they saw. "By the way, I think the Jungfrau, and all that region of Alps, which I traversed in September--going to the very top of the Wengen, which is not the highest (the Jungfrau itself is inaccessible) but the best point of view--much finer than Mont-Blanc and Chamouni, or the Simplon I kept a journal of the whole for my sister Augusta, part of which she copied and let Murray see.