LAST WORDS OF EMINENT PERSONS.* SEEING that Mr. Kaines does
not profess to be more than a com- piler, we might be doing him injustice if we subjected his book to any higher test of criticism. Perhaps his worst fault is that he is so easily contented ; that as long as he has found an account of any man's death in any other book, if only the man be well known and his name be placed in alphabetical order, Mr. Kaines thinks he has done his duty. To such lengths does he carry this princi- ple, that he quotes a former compilation as if it was an original work, and we see our old favourite Henri Beyle placed under con- tribution for the death of Haydn, which is then calmly assigned to "The Book of Death." Indeed, Mr. Kaines has a predilection
for second-hand information. For the death-beds of ancient Romans he looks to Merivale ; modern ones are often hunted up in the Quarterly or Edinburgh. In some cases the man's death passes unnoticed, and we are indulged with copious comments on his life. And neither by selection nor arraugereent, neither by comment nor suggestion, is any moral drawn from the closing scenes of so many persons of alphabetical eminence, or the reader assisted in drawing his own moral.
• Lost Words of Eminent Persona. Comprising, in the majority of lustauces, a brief accJuut of their last holm. Compiled by Jevph Milne.. Loudon: Routledge. 1868.
Mr. Kaines takes credit for this in his preface. " In mak- ing this collection, he had no theory to prove, no sect to serve." We give him credit for not sacrificing the truth to sectarian prejudices, after the manner of some who have dis- torted the last words of their adversaries. But there are many lessons to be derived from some of the scenes selected in this volume, and some lessons from the mode of selection. No less a man than Bacon drew the moral, " how little alteration in good spirits the approaches of death make ; for they appear to be the same men till the last instant. Augustus Caesar died in a compliment ; Tiberius in dissimulation ; Vespasian in a jest ; Galba with a sentence ; Septimus Severus in despatch." All these were meant to be instances of the ruling passion strong in death. And death-bed scenes might be ranged under four heads, putting first the instances cited by Bacon, then the cases where last words bear an unintentional significance, next what we may call incidents of feeling, and lastly, those which are not worth recording. Cer- tainly the last abound in this volume, but this is partly owing to Mr. Kaines's mistaken idea that a man who has done anything noteworthy during his life must be followed to his death with the same sort of publicity, must in fact have a public funeral at the expense of the general reader. It is also owing to the fact that natural deaths and violent deaths are all placed together. The solemn words of a distinguished man on the way to the scaffold are placed side by side with some careless remark to a friend, or doctor, or servant. Byron's words, " I must sleep now," are, for instance, made full of meaning by that sleep being the sleep of death. So, too, Goethe's last request for more light, and Locke's " Cease now." But it is very different with Pitt's last sentence, " How I leave my country !" when he knew he was dying ; and with Danton's " Thou wilt show my head to the people ; it is worth showing." Surely the parting vaunt of a king of men in the hands of pigmies, and the despairing cry of a statesman who felt that his cause was lost, are not to be classed with the natural request of a weak patient for something to rest him or to cheer his spirits. The book before us would have gained infinitely in dramatic value if there had been any such arrangement by subjects. This is only attempted once, and we quote the passage to show that the same might be done more frequently :—
"Bayle died, asking if his fire was lighted. Black, the great chemist, died so tranquilly that he did not even spill the contents of the spoon, which he held in his hand. Bentley, the classic scholar and divine, died so peacefully that his children, who were playing around the sofa on which he lay, perceived only that he still slept. Petrarch was found dead in his study, with his head reclining on a book, as it was wont to do when he was reading or thinking. Sir Charles Blagden, whilst at a social meal with his friends M. and Mdme. Berthollet and Gay-Lussac, died in his chair so quietly, that not a drop of the coffee in the cup which he held in his hand was spilled."
How much this juxtaposition would have added to the two curious cases of artistic nicety which are almost 200 pages apart. Alonzo Cano pushing away a badly carved crucifix, and declaring
that he could not bear the sight of such a wretched piece of work- manship, might well be matched with Malherbe, who, when dying, abused his nurse for making use of a solecism in her language, and said to his confessor, who was speaking tritely of the felicities of a future state, " Hold your tongue ; your wretched style only makes me out of conceit with them."
Whether these last are genuine instances of the ruling passion may be doubted. Those cited by Bacon do not bear out Macau- lay's sneer at Pope's theory, for they show that Bacon had much the same view on the subject. No one would maintain that all men must have a ruling passion, but only that it predominates in some men, and is the spring of their chief actions. Does it not throw a light on the character of Lorenzo de' Medici to read that at the moment of death he pressed a " magnificent" crucifix to his lips ? Can anything be more significant of Lord Chesterfield's character than his " Give Dayroles a chair ?"
When we find Harvey making observations on the state of his pulse till the last moment ; and Haller exclaiming, " The artery no longer beats ;" and Cardinal Beton shrieking " I am a priest, I am a priest!" and Cardinal Beaufort asking, " Will not death be bribed ?" and Hobbes glad to find a hole to creep out of the world at ; and Bishop Butler never so conscious of his own inability to save himself ; and Lulli burning the music of an unperformed opera at the request of his confessor, while he kept another copy ; and Frederick William arresting a penitential hymn at the words, " Naked I came into the world, and naked shall I go," to explain with vivacity, "No, not quite naked, I shall have my uniform on !" and Cavour saying of the Neapolitans, " Li lavi, li lavi, li 'evil" but of Italy, " Oh ! ma is coca va ; state genii the ormai is ewe va," have we not at once the man of science, and the unjust, and the wearied thinker, and the unwearied believer, and the cunning artist, and the Royal pedant, and the maker of Italy ? They had other characteristic features, all of them, but we know them best by these. Even Augustus, whom Bacon represents as the essence of courtesy, dying in a compliment, had something else in him, and showed it, too, in the hour of death :—
" On the morning of his death, being now fully sensible of his approaching end, Augustus inquired whether there were any popular excitement in anticipation of his death. Being no doubt re- assured upon this point, he called for a mirror—and desired his grey hairs and beard to be decently arranged. Then, asking of the friends around him whether he had played well his part in the drama of life, he muttered a verse from a comic epilogue, inviting them to greet his last exit with applause. He made some inquiries after a sick grandchild of Tiberius, and falling at last into the arms of Livia, had just strength, in the last moment of expiring, to recommend to her the memory of their long union."
This description of Mr. Merivale's makes it plain that Augustus paid the compliment to himself. His dying words are the perfec- tion of statecraft and self-esteem. There is more to be admired in the last words of Scarron :—" My good friends, you will never cry so much for me as I have made you laugh."
The number of death-bed parallels that might be made, either from Mr. Kaines's volume or wider reading, would be curious, if the words used were not generally so common to all men. We have already observed that Byron's last sentence was the natural expression of a patient, and it hardly adds to its value when we meet with it again in the mouth of Jean Paul. The last words of two or three men were, " God bless you !" Those of many who went to the scaffold were, " Into Thy hands I commend my spirit !" A parallel is made by Mr. Gleig, in his Life of Warren Hastings, between Hastings, Socrates, Pompey, and Caesar, all of whom covered their faces in the supreme moment. To Mr. Gleig this shows a lofty sense of self-respect, and in Hastings especially, " the act of covering up his own face in the very moment of sever- ance between soul and body, has about it a character which I can describe as nothing short of sublime." We cannot help looking upon it as rather accidental. In our opinion, the best parallel in this volume is that drawn by De Quincey between Nelson and Kant, both of whom took leave of their friends with a kiss, the "inexor- ably manly" Englishman, and the stoical German philosopher. One scene, however, remains which is utterly without a parallel, and it is well that it should stand alone in history. We speak of the death-bed of Queen Caroline, the consort of George II.
"In a scene of this kind it would be inconceivable that aught of the ludicrous or farcical should find a place. Yet such was the fact. We are shocked in the very chamber of death by the intrusion of royal egotism, vanity, buffoonery, and inhumanity. The King is at one mo- ment dissolved in a mawkish tenderness, at another sunk into brutal apathy. He is at one moment all tears for the loss of one who united the softness and amiability of one sex to the courage and firmness of the other ; at another all fury because the object of his regrets cannot swallow, or cannot change her posture, or cannot animate the glassy fixedness of her eyes ; at one moment he begins an elaborate pane- gyric on her virtues, then breaks off into an enumeration of his own, by which he implied that her heart had been enthralled and her intelligence awed. He then diverges into a stupid story about a storm, for which his daughter laughs at him ; and then, while he is weeping over his consort's death-bed, she advises him to marry again ; and we are—what the Queen was not—startled at the strange reply, `Non, j'aurai des mattresses.' To which she faintly moaned out the rejoinder, ' Cele n'empetche pas I ' "
It is impossible to conceive anything more ghastly. A husband takes leave of his dying wife in words which to a good wife meant unfaithfulness to her memory ; the dying wife tells her husband to pledge his faith to another, and to break it. His callousness to her, and her callousness to herself, are conspicuous throughout the narrative, but it is in this they culminate. Another death-bed such as this would make us despair of humanity.
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