even more labour than he anticipated. Nevertheless, work, work, work,' said he, 'went on to a degree which it is most painful to recollect.' He finished the production in due course, and it proved a great success. But the price was a life. That book,' said he, 'was my death-blow.'

It is not difficult to realise the despair of Trollope père in his race with old age and infirmity. This gentleman, although not a sworn littérateur himself, could use the pen as became the husband of a lady who wrote 115 volumes though starting at the age of fifty, and the father of two sons, who were similarly prolific. The work he had in hand was an Ecclesiastical Dictionary, which, of course, required considerable research, and, indeed, a large amount of labour. When Death sent him a hint that he should call upon him at no distant date, the poor man had only reached the letter 'D.' Here was a case in which there could be no abridgment of toil, no contraction of his scheme. Each letter must have due honour paid it. It was impossible to curtail 'M' or omit 'S' altogether. Two or three parts had already been published and delivered to subscribers, and therefore he stood doubly pledged to complete the work. Verily it was a cruel position to occupy. But bravely he persisted, though the greater part of the alphabet was still before him. All to no purpose, however. It was a struggle in which he could not hope for success, and the undertaking therefore sadly and completely collapsed.

Dr. Thomas Young, when visited by a friend (Hudson Gurney) during his last illness, was found busily engaged with his Egyptian Dictionary. Though fully conscious of his position as a dying man, he could not be prevailed upon to relinquish his labours. He must finish that work if possible!—at any rate he would not 'live a single idle day,' however little space might

be left him in this world. With him, in fact, it was duty and discipline to the last, as it was with the gallant troops in the 'Birkenhead' who went down into the waters, though they knew that their circling march on deck could not arrest the doomster for an instant.

Thomas Henry Buckle's death-cry at Damascus may be said to have vibrated through many lands where the earlier part of his wonderful History of Civilization had been read. 'O my Book,' exclaimed he, 'my Book!' as if in despair that, spite of all his industry, he must leave it incomplete.

'If I had 500 years of assured existence,' said an author; ‘if I could employ every moment of that time in writing and collecting material for my works; if I took neither rest by day nor sleep by night, I could not execute a tithe of the works I have already planned!' That man had whole volumes-reams of paper-filled with the mere titles and outlines of productions he had imagined. Amongst them was a History of Abandoned Theories, Speculations, and Institutions, which, of course, meant a history of human thought and development; and another was a biography of each disease, detailing its progress and manifestations in a narrative form as if it were some individual thing, and illustrating it by striking cases and racy anecdotes as far as the subject would permit. His biography of gout, his life of a paralysed patient, as sketched, would each have required years for their due elaboration. What must have been the despair of such a soul when he reflected that he could no more execute his schemes within the compass of a short life, than he could rebuild all the cathedrals of Europe with his own hands?

Few more pregnant books have been published than the treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium of Copernicus, for its object was to introduce order and symmetry into the solar

system, to give the sun its rightful place as Lord of the Heavens, and to wipe out the vortices and epicycles with which the Ptolemaic hypothesis had littered the universe. Yet the cautious writer shrank from the publication of a work which he felt would revolutionise philosophy; the book lay in his desk, as he said, 'not only nine years which is the time Horace prescribes, but almost four times nine years;' and when, at last, it did see the light, and a copy was placed in his hands, his agitation became so great that it brought on a violent discharge of blood, which shortly terminated his existence.

The shadow of death was already stealing upon John Richard Green when he undertook the composition of his Making of England. Believing that he had only a few weeks to live, he addressed himself to the task, not merely with the devotion of an author, but with the ardour of a true patriot. His passionate interest in the Life of the People invested the duty with supreme importance. I have work to do that I know is good,' said he. Almost every moment he could wrench from overpowering pain was expended upon the book. Some parts were written thrice, others five times. Life, said his doctors, was kept within him by sheer force of will alone. Scarcely was the work printed than, spite of the darkening day and the nearing night, he resolved to make substantial changes in its plan. The impression therefore was cancelled. Told that he had only a few days to live, he touchingly craved a single 'week more to write some part of it down.' But before the first chapter was concluded his strength failed him, the mystic monitions could be no longer neglected; and then, but not till then, the light of earth fast fading from his eyes, did the brave toiler permit himself to say, 'Now I am weary: I can work no more!'

CHAPTER XIX.

THE FINAL STAGE.

DR. HENRY, the historian, once wrote to his friend Sir Harry Moncreiff, 'Come out here directly: I have got something to do this week; I have got to die!' 'I am glad you are here,' said Mozart to his sister-in-law, on her calling one evening; 'you must stay with me to-night, and see me die!'

And this is what the sons of genius must do as well as the children of clay. For each there is a week, a day, an hour, in which he has 'got to die.' Omnes una manet nox, et calcanda semel via leti est. Death took no notice of Prince Kaunitz's interdict against the bare mention of his name, but came for the haughty noble in due course, though possibly at the cost of a stormy interview. The privileged phantom, who has the right of entry into palace as well as cottage, is not likely to forget his most brilliant victims. With uplifted hand and well-directed dart, he approaches them as confidently as he does the parish idiot or the worn-out pauper. No door is strong enough to shut out the King of Terrors, and no genius bright enough to maintain its glow after one chilling breath has issued from his lips. When he called for Christopher Smart, it would have been in vain for the poet to plead that he had entered into a contract with one Gardner, a bookseller, to write for him for ninety-nine years, and considered himself bound in honour to fulfil his engagement!

Robert Sands, one of America's most promising sons, composed a short poem on the 'Dead of 1832.' Not many days after its appearance, whilst engaged in an article for a periodical, and just after he had written the line, 'O think not my spirit among you abides,' he was struck with paralysis, and in four hours lay amongst the 'Dead of 1832.' On the manuscript there were several illegible characters extending nearly across the page, as if his fingers had moved on in darkness after receiving the fatal stroke, or as if the hand had been unwilling to forget its cunning at such an early age as thirty-three.

Thomas Hood's last letter, addressed to Dr. Moir ('Delta'), is characteristic of the writer's mingled humour and pathos. 'Dear Moir, God bless you and yours, and good-bye. I drop these few last lines as in a bottle from a ship water-logged, and on the brink of foundering, being in the last stage of dropsical debility; but, though suffering in body, serene in mind. So, without reversing my Union-Jack, I await my last lurch. Till which believe me, dear Moir, yours most truly, Thomas Hood.'

Like ordinary mortals the privileged ones have occasionally manifested extreme reluctance to die, and though obviously drowning in disease, going down palpably in the great abyss of futurity, have clutched their pens as if they were buoys which would float them to land again. The eccentric Ernst Hoffman could not bring himself to believe that his last hour had come, but when his lower limbs had virtually expired, and the little remains of vitality were retreating to the head, the body having become stiff up to the neck, he told the doctor that he would 'soon be through it now,' and declared that he would proceed with the dictation of the work he had in hand that very night! He was willing, he said, to give up the use of all his limbs, provided he could retain the power of keeping an amanuensis