Gibbon had been staying at Sheffield House in the preceding June--the letter was written in November--and his friends all noted that “Mr. G.” had become strangely loath to take exercise and very inert in his movements. Indeed, he had detained the house-party in the house during lovely days together while he had orated to them on the folly of unnecessary exertion; and such was his charm that every one, both women as well as men, seems to have cheerfully given up the glorious English June weather to keep him company. Never was he more brilliant--never a more delightful companion; yet all the time he was like the Spartan boy and the wolf, for he knew of his secret trouble, yet he thought that no one else suspected. It is an instance of how little we see ourselves as others see us that this supremely able man, who could see as far into a millstone as anyone, lived for years with a hydrocele that reached below his knees while he wore the tight breeches of the eighteenth century and was in the fond delusion that nobody else knew anything about it. Of course, everybody knew; probably it had been the cause of secret merriment among all his acquaintance; when the tragedy came to its last act it turned out that every one had been talking about it all the time, and that they had thought it to be a rupture about which Mr. Gibbon had of course taken advice. After leaving Sheffield House the hydrocele suddenly increased, as Gibbon himself says, “most stupendously”; and it began to dawn upon him that it “ought to be diminished.” So he called upon Dr. Walter Farquhar; and Dr. Farquhar was very serious and called in Dr. Cline, “a surgeon of the first eminence,” both of whom “viewed it and palped it” and pronounced it a hydrocele. Mr. Gibbon, with his usual good sense and calm mind, prepared to face the necessary “operation” and a future prospect of wearing a truss which Dr. Cline intended to order for him. In the meantime he was to crawl about with some labour and “much indecency,” and he prayed Lord Sheffield to “varnish the business to the ladies, yet I am much afraid it will become public,” as if anything could any longer conceal the existence of this monstrous chimera. It is hardly credible, but Gibbon had had the hydrocele since 1761--thirty-two years--yet had never even hinted of it to Lord Sheffield, with whom he had probably discussed every other fact connected with his life; and had even forbidden his valet to mention it in his presence or to anyone else. Gibbon, the historian who, more than any other, set Reason and Common Sense on their thrones, seems to have been ashamed of his hydrocele. Once more we wonder how little even able men may perceive the truth of things! In 1761 he had consulted Cæsar Hawkins, who apparently had not been able to make up his mind whether it was a hernia or a hydrocele. In 1787 Lord Sheffield had noticed a sudden great increase in the size of the thing; and in 1793, as we have seen, it came to tragedy.