Army

ast words he uttered-Head-Armyevinced clearly enough what sort of visions were passing over his mind at the moment of dissolution.

Tasso's dying request to Cardinal Cynthia was indicative of the gloom which haunted him through life; he had but one favour, he said, to reqest of him, which was, that he would collect his works, and commit them to the flames, especially his Jerusalem Delivered.

Leibnitz was found dead in his chamber, with a book in his hand.

Clarendon's pen dropped from his fingers when he was seized with the palsy, which terminated his life.

Chaucer died ballad making. His last production he entitled, “A Ballad, made by Geoffry Chaucer on his death-bed, lying in great anguish." Barthelemy was seized with death while reading his favourite Horace.

Sir Godfrey Kneller's vanity was displayed in his last moments. Pope, who visited him two days before he died, says he never saw a scene of so much vanity in his life; he was sitting up in his bed, contemplating the plan he was making for his

own monument.

Wycherly, when dying, had his young wife brought to his bed-side, and having taken her hand

in a very solemn manner, said, he had but one request to make of her, and that was, that she would never marry an old man again. There is every reason to believe, though it is not stated in the account, that so reasonable a request could not be denied at such a moment.

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Bolingbroke," says Spence, "in his last illness desired to be brought to the table where we were sitting at dinner; his appearance was such that we all thought him dying, and Mrs. Arbuthnot involuntarily exclaimed, "This is quite an Egyptian feast." On another authority he is represented as being overcome by terrors and excessive passion in his last moments, and, after one of his fits of choler, being overheard by Sir Harry Mildmay complaining to himself, and saying, "What will my poor soul undergo for all these things?"

Keats, a little before he died, when his friend asked him how he did, replied in a low voice, "Better, my friend. I feel the daisies growing over me."

In D'Israeli's admirable work on "Men of Genius," from which some of the preceding accounts are taken, many others are to be found, tending to illustrate more forcibly, perhaps, than any of those instances we have given, the soothing, and,

if the word may be allowed, the benign influence of literary habits on the tranquillity of the individual in his last moments.

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CHAPTER XIV.

THE IMPROVIDENCE OF LITERARY MEN.

it

Ir the misfortunes of men of genius were unconnected with their infirmities, any notice of them, however brief, would be irrelevant to the subject of these pages. In literature self, there surely is nothing to favor improvidence, or to unfit men for the active duties of life; but in the habits which literary men contract from excessive application to their pursuits, there is a great deal to disqualify the studious man for those petty details of economy and prudence, which are essential to the attainment of worldly prosperity. "It is incongruous," says Burns, “'tis absurd to suppose that a man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at the sacred flame of poetry-a man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race, who soars above this little scene of things, can condescend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terræ-filial race fret, and fume, and vex themselves." Poor Burns had evidently his own improvidence in view when he made this observation, but he must have been

the most simple-minded of bards if he expected to disarm the censure of the world by it. Its charity may sometimes extend to the eccentricities of genius, but seldom to the poverty that springs from its improvidence. The greatest explosion of periodical morality that we remember to have occurred for some years, took place in most of the newspapers of the day, not many months ago, on the occasion of the appearance of the life of a celebrated bard, in which the biographer had unfortunately spoken of the poetic temperament as one ill-calculated to favour the cultivation of the social and domestic ties. Many men of genius have unquestionably been every thing that men should be in all the relations of private life; therefore, with those outrageous moralists, there was no reason why all men of genius should not be patterns of excellence to all good citizens, husbands, fathers, and economical managers of private affairs. No reason can be given why they should not be such. We only know, that such the majority of them unfortunately are not; and, indeed, in the varied distribution of nature's gifts, when we generally find the absence of one excellence atoned for by the possession of another, it would be in vain to expect a combination of all such advantages in the same individual. Nature cannot afford to be so