We slept at Gloucester on the 30th. On ye 31st passed through pretty Rodborough Vale, and Badminton Park, not a fine place, tho’ large, and arrived here, Bowood, 31st August, Saturday. Found Ld. Lansdown in high good humour and cordiality with me, and in very good health and spirits. The Smiths were just come from Warwick. Mr. Dumont is here, and two or three other indifferent people. Poor old Ingenhousz is dying rapidly. He is shrunk to a skeleton. Ld. L. with great humanity and feeling affords him an asylum, which his other friends were averse to, as the beholding of a dying man is a painful spectacle. He talks with intrepidity of death, but, _hélas!_ where can the courage come from? The subject is a painful one. Dumont and I walked every morning, that is to say, the three I stayed, in ye garden: his conversation is always amusing and instructive. We talked over books that we each liked, especially Bonnet’s beautiful work, _Contemplation de la nature_, which contains many interesting expositions of the wonderful economy of nature in the structure of plants and animals. Had he not too frequently allowed his imagination to run off with him when he turns to the attributes of the divinity, he would tire less, but his apostrophes which aim at sublimity are generally incomprehensible and bombast. Whilst I have been travelling I have not been idle in the way of reading; we have read already ye first seven volumes of Henry’s _History of England_. It is written upon a more extensive plan than that suggested by Voltaire and partly adopted by Hume. Of public affairs the changes have been so varied and rapid that it is difficult to recollect the exact position of things. Bonaparte was repulsed from before Acre, and obliged to return with a diminished and dispirited army into Egypt. The circumstance the most humiliating is that his great name should be coupled with that of the bullying bluster of that charlatan, Sr. Sidney Smith, who has obtained the command of some marines and gun-boats against him in Syria. How fickle is the glory of a hero! That ‘... name at which mankind grew pale’ is now lost in obscurity, and the events in the East, which occupied and tortured the breast of every politician in Europe, are now so overlooked that barely are they discussed in the survey of politics at present. [Sidenote: STATE OF NAPLES]