As you have been so often troubled with my complainings, I think it is but equitable that you should be informed of my improvements. Since our late, short, equinoctial savage of a Summer, I have very much mended with the weather. Indeed I may call myself comparatively well, for I ought not to take into the Account the slight drawback of short interruptions. I grow fat if that is a symptom of health, and I think my digestion is better than it has been for some years. I do not however attempt to go down stairs, and it is now so late in the year that I feel from a little hoarseness &c that it is better not to attempt it: my chest is easily affected.

How very kind in you to send me a whole Covey of Partridges! I know you have /as/ much pleasure in giving as I have in receiving such kind marks of attention. But such a bountiful gift is too great a robbery of your own table. I grudged it to myself.

I cannot forbear communicating to you a circumstance which has delighted me beyond measure. Some particular friends of mine General Macaulay, &c together with the Baron de Staël son of that admirable genius, but unhappy woman, Madame de Stael, are now staying at Ferney and are erecting a Protestant Church and establishing a Bible Society in the very house, on the very Ashes of Voltaire, and Christianity is triumphing on the identical spot whence the blasphemous menace was confidently sent forth – ‘il faut ecraser l’Infame’, the name you know by which he constantly characterised the Saviour of the World. It is not always in the Moral any more than the Physical World that the Antidote is /as/ happily applied to the poison. Your country /man/ M^r. Erskine a very rich and learned Lawyer, who has lately published a valuable work ‘on the Evidences of Christianity,’ is assisting in this good work at Ferney. I doubt not it will prosper

I cordially hope that your own health and that of your amiable lady has resisted all the vicissitudes of weather. Miss Frowd joins me in best regards to both.