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It is incalculable how much I have on my hands, night and day; but, thank God! my health is good, though my anxiety is great. A fresh Levanter having sprung up, the lugger sails immediately. Phil. Dumaresq is very well, as are all the others. Poor Graves is the only person we have lost of the class of officers.
Vincent, Collingwood's division was seen some distance to leeward, but, as not infrequently happens in and near the Mediterranean, the wind with it came from the opposite quarter to that which Nelson had. The latter, therefore, would not stop, nor lose a mile of the ground over which his fair breeze was carrying him. "My dear Collingwood," he wrote, "We are in a fresh Levanter.
It was not, however, a very agreeable morning; the Levanter was blowing, the signal station was enveloped in mist, the tops of the mountains of Africa were scarcely discernible above the clouds, and Ceuta and Ape's Hill were invisible.
A week later, on the 26th of April, he complains: "From the 9th I have been using every effort to get down the Mediterranean, but to this day we are very little advanced. From March 26th, we have had nothing like a Levanter, except for the French fleet. I have never been one week without one, until this very important moment. It has half killed me; but fretting is of no use."
Such a night as gives the travellers in the mail-packet some notion of those ups and downs in life which landsmen may bless themselves to ignore, as hints to the Queen's Messenger, seasoned though he be, that ten minutes more of that heaving, pitching, tremulous motion would lay him alongside those poor sick neophytes whom he pities and condemns; reminding him how even he has cause to be thankful when he reflects that, save for an occasional Levanter, the Mediterranean is a mill-pond compared to La Manche.
And indeed, my pseudo Gallus, let me remark that, being myself a native of the Mediterranean, I can enter better than you can into the childish delight that our friend Caius Plinius expresses. It is a joy which is not to be found in the nature of the American to sleep in the tropic heats of a July sun. Winter is abhorrent to the nature of every Levanter.
I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let them be their amusement in the schools. Illa se jactet in aula Æolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet. But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us!
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