He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings in his
volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes he
coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless
despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's "Homer" and Thomson's
"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready
balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion, and, to
do justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were
his men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without, and the
cockroaches within the camp; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he
satisfies himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the
sand is precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a
scorpion, he makes sure of his scientific description in case he should
expire of the bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some
rational interest in the number of legs possessed by the centipedes
which preoccupy it. This is the highest triumph of man over his
accidents, when he thus turns his pains to gains, and becomes an
entomologist in the tropics.
Meanwhile the rebels kept their own course in the forests, and
occasionally descended upon plantations beside the very river on whose
upper waters the useless troops were sickening and dying.
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