XXVI. Death from Chronic Decay. "Now spring returns; but not to me returns And all the joys of life with health are flown. And count the silent moments as they pass; BRUCE. THE gradual decay of some portions of the system, the growth of some obstruction, the undue preponderance of some elements, or the deficiency of others, through the slow operation of chronic disease, is to many of the children of men, both early and late, the manner of the close. In dropsy, through the accumulation of one elementary part of our organization, the system becomes deranged, and in the end yields to the pressure. Its fatal effects are more common in advancing years.. It caused the death of Robert Cecil, the famous Earl of Salisbury, of Joseph Scaliger, Monk, Duke of Albemarle, Waller, Maclaurin, Johnson, Gibbon, and Fox. Dropsy in the chest destroyed the lives of Bishop Cosin, of the pious Nelson, and of Pope; and Sir Matthew Hale and Addison sank under dropsy with asthma. 12 (133) Gout, the painful, often hereditary malady, which, after many years of occasional suffering, at length brings down the edifice that has become thoroughly undermined, was destructive to Lord Shaftesbury, Condé, Lord Roscommon, Betterton, Congreve, Gray, Helvetius, and the learned Bishops Stillingfleet, Gastrell, and Conybeare. The stone has been the torment of many men of learning, or of sedentary habits. By some such complaints died the Popes Pius the Fifth and Gregory the Fourteenth, the Czar Peter the Great, Tycho Brahe, Luther, Linacre, Julius. Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Kenelm Digby, Episcopius, Hammond, Bishop Wilkins, Anthony Wood, Horneck, Jeremy Collier, Buffon, and Sir Isaac Newton. An ulceration of the bladder was fatal to Linnæus. The accomplished Marquess of Halifax, Sir William Petty, Sanderson the mathematician, and the learned Jacob Bryant, died of gangrene. So died the poet Mason, after a wound which he received in alighting from his carriage; and so Puffendorf, after a slight injury to one of his toes, in cutting the nail. Bishop Kenn and Robert Hall were worn out by protracted disease in the kidneys, and Christopher Smart by a complaint of the liver. The disease which Napoleon inherited from his father, as the source of his own death, was cancer in the stomach. Chief, however, amongst all the causes of lingering decay and death, is the consumption of the lungs; a malady which sometimes has continued through onethird or one-half of the appointed years of man, and sometimes has done its work in a few short weeks. The hereditary tendency in many families; the originating occasions; the gradual developments; the struggle be tween apprehension and hope; the emaciation; the hæmorrhages; the peculiarly interesting traits which often irradiate the countenance; the ultimate difficulty of respiration; the final extinction of the breath; are but too well known, and too often witnessed. Of those who are thus removed, and who form by far the largest number of victims of any one disease, as reckoned in our statistical tables, many are in the bloom of youth or of early manhood. For this cause, they have less often attained celebrity than those whose path has been closed by other maladies. Still, the bright signs of precocious genius have frequently blazed up, only to be extinguished by consumption. So, at sixteen, died that young Josiah of England, Edward the Sixth; so, even earlier, the sweet songstresses, Lucretia and Maria Davidson; so, at twenty-one, Henry Kirke White; so Baratier, a prodigy of youthful learning. But the venerable Bede expired also under an asthmatic consumption; it exhausted the bodily endurance, but not the inward patience, of Donne and Scougal, of Bishop Davenant and Kettlewell, of Bishop Bagot and of Henry Thornton; it ended the days of Spinosa and of Bayle, and withered the laurels of Bürger, of the tender and profound Novalis, of the brilliant Keats in all his promise, and of our affectionate Brainard. Those deep, internal maladies, which have their seat in the whole system of the circulation, or which plant decay in some particular organ, are met, it may be, for a time, and baffled by the resources of skill and experience. The body may partially, perhaps almost entirely, fulfil its work, even when its powers have become imperfect. With uneasiness and pain, however, in some of its functions, it bears up against the obstruction. The progress of the chronic disease is sometimes imperceptible, and sometimes interrupted; but the vital organization is ever like a besieged city. Barrier after barrier yields, till the citadel itself is assailed. The powers of life offer there their last resistance; but it has become feebler after so many losses; and at length the breath ceases, and the pulse throbs no more. XXVII. Death from Old Age "Like a shadow thrown Softly and lightly from a passing cloud, WORDSWORTH. IF no violence interrupt the life of man; if he escape the diseases incident to infancy, youth, and manhood; if his frame be complete, and be preserved from all occasional perils, or preserved through them all; if no particular portion of his system yield to a premature decay, he may live on to old age, the survivor of most of his contemporaries. Death finds him at last, through some lighter attack, which at an earlier period would hardly have seemed a sickness; or through a general cessation of all the wheels of life, as if they were merely brought to a stand by the exhaustion of the original force which had impelled their motion. This is the death of old age, when no other cause, or no other cause of importance, except old age itself, can be assigned for the general dissolution of physical nature. A nervous fever cut off, with little violence, the life of the aged Kosciusko. Bishop Hurd, having lived to a great age, much beyond fourscore, and having passed his closing years in a dignified and devout seclusion, fell asleep one night and never awoke. The still more venerable Bishop Barrington, at ninety-two, read the (137) 12* |