THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19174, 3 December 1927, Page 13

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

HALF HOURS IN A LIBRARY. (SPBCMLLT WBITTBN IO» THI mas.) By A. H. Grinlinc, CCXLVI.-ON DEATH AND DYING. There bo many ways in whioh we can i..fiet death, and Anthony Trollope passed out with a laugh. Mr Michael Sadleir depicts the "Final Scene" in one brief page of his "Commentary": "On the evening of November 3rd, 1882 " he crites "Sir John Tilley, his daughter, and Anthony Trollcjpe. his brother-in-law, were aimug quietly in London. The old novelist was \n exaggerated spirits. Indeed, he was somewhat excited, for during the afternoon he had come to altercation with the leader of a German band which had played disturbingly under his window at Garland's Hotel. But in the gaiety of intimate talk, his too emphatic laughter passed unnoticed. After dinner the little party settled in the drawing-ioom to read aloud from Anstey's 'Vice-Versa.' This story had just been published, and was the craze of every London gathering at which book?, were at all a theme of conversation. The reading aloud progressed. Every now and again great gusts of laughter caught both listeners and reader so that the tale was broken off, and the room grew clamorous with shouts of merriment. But in the midst of one such joyful interruption, came realisation of a sudden silence The loudest laugh had failed to sound. Trollope had had a stroke and lay there speechless, propped crookedly against his easy chair. They moved him to a house in Welbeck street. He rallied: sank again. For nearly five weeks he lingered on, hardly speaking, only intermittently aware of those about his bed. On the evening of December Oth, 1882, he died." Mr Sadlier concludes with a passage which ranks high as listerature :

Thus laughing, he passed, out of a world of laughter; thus, from the land of men and women whom he had so shrewdly understood, so tenderly described, he crossed over to the further shore, whence (in his own words) ho stretched out his hand bidding farewell. "In the Northern Sagas," writes J. W. Mackail in his "Life of William Morris," "as in the heroic cycle of nncicnt Greece, a man's life is not fully ended till he has been laid underground and the accident of death has been followed by the sacred office of burial. That reluctance to end the story, to part with its hero until tho funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, was an attitude of mind which Morri3 himself specially loved, and if we may believe that any sense of tho last rite performed-over them may touch the dead, he might find a last satisfaction in the simple and impressive ceremony of his funeral. He was buried in tho little churchyard of Kelmscott on October 6th. 1896. The night had been wet, and morning lightened dully over soaking meadows, fading away in a blur of mist. As the day went on the wind and rain both increased and rose in the afternoon to a tempest. The storm, which raged witli great violence over the whole country, with furious southwesterly gales, reached its greatest force iii the upper Thames Valley. The low-lying lands were flooded and all the little streams that are fed from the Cotswolds ran full and deep growing. The noise of waters was everywhere. Clumps .of Michaelmas daisies were in flower in the drenched oottn.ee gardens and the thinning willows had turned, not to the brilliance of their common October colouring, but to a dull, tarnished gold. The rooks were silent about the Manor House. Apples lay strewn on the grass in the orchard. In the garden, the yew dragon, untrimmed since his own hand had last clipped it, had sprouted out into bristles. A few pink roses and sweet peas still lingered among the chrysanthemums and dahlias of the outumnnal plots."

One of the last entries in Barbellion's "Last Diary," dated May 20th,

t 9l u' T! ads: " If l could P'«aso myself I should have my cofin made and kept under my bed. Then if I should die they could just pull the bos out, and put me in it. It is the orthodox pompa mortis' that makes death bo V,?tf. and terrible. I like the idea of \Yilliam Morris, who was taken to the cemetery in an old farm cart." Mackail describes the scene:—

One of the farm •waggons, with a yellow body and bright red wheels, was prepared in the morning to carry the coffin from Lechdale station; it was drawn by a sleek roan mars and led by one of the Kelmscott carters. The waggon was wreathed with vines and strewn w,th willow boughs over a carpeting of moss. In it the coffin, simple and beautiful even in its severe design of unpolished oak with wrought-iron handles, was placed on its arrival, and over it was laid a piece of Broussa brocade which had been long in Morris's possession, and a wreath of bay. The group of mourners followed it along the dripping lanes between niOßsed liedgerowß and silver-grey slabbed atone fences to the churchyard gates and up the short lime avenue to the tiny church.

William Hazlitt's essay, "On the Fear of Death," written more than a hundred jears ago, has long been a favourite of mine. In it Hazlitt said: "No man woukl, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves." Procter gives an unforgettable picture of Hazlitt on his death-bed. "1 saw him,'' he writes, "(once only) as he lay ghastly, shrunk, and helpless, on the bed from which he never afterwards rose. His mind seemed to have weathered all the dangers of extreme sickness and to be safe and strong as ever. But the physical portion had endured! sad decay. He could not lift his hand from the coverlet, and his voice was changed and diminished to a hoarse whisper resembling the faint scream that I have heard from birds. I never was so sensible of the power of death before." In his "Life," Mr P. Howe says:—

Hazlitt died and was buried in the heart of his beloved West End, where the motor-buses now go past him, and the theatres have come westwards to stand at his either hand. His death, save for some short-lived controversy over tho degree of poverty in which he had died, passed for the greater part unnoticed. In France both he and his work were known; in Germany Heine championed his memory. But in his own country, where there came within eighteen months the logical end of tho age through which he had lived, he was neglected and forgotten. His life, bounded at one end by the War of Independence, and the French Revolution, and at the other by tho Keform Bill, was not seen to be possessed of any kind of symbolic value. His steady rise from the oblivion in which he appeared to die, may be shortly traced in the concluding pages of this narrative.

One of the finest of the passings of men of letters was that of Thackeray, well described by Mr Lewis Melville: "Carlyle has related how on December 20th he 'was riding in the dusk heavy of heart, along by the Serpentine and Hyde Park, where some human brother,from a chariot with a young lady in it threw me a shower of salutations. I looked up—it was Thackeray with his daughter; the last time I was to see him in this world. On the 21st Thackeray attended the funeral of a relative, Lady ltodd; and on that dav or the next he went to the Athenaeum. There he and Dickens passed each other on the stairs, as usual since the Yates affair without giving any sign of recognition; then Thackeray turned back and with outstretched hand went up to Dickens and said he could no longer bear to be on anv but the old terms of friendship. "'I saw him shortly before Christmas at the Athenaeum Club, Dickens has recorded 'when lie told me he had been in bed three days, that after those attacks he was troubled with cold shivering 3 which quite took the work out of him, and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he described. He was very cheerful and looked very bright. A few days later Dickens was looking into the other's grave." Of the manner of Thackeray's passing the same chronicler writes:

On the evening of Thursday, December 23rd, 1863, Thackeray went into his study and: worked on the proofs of "Denis Duval," but feeling ill, ho retired at an early hour. It was noticed afterwards that the last words he revised were: " An , ( J my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss. Tho next morning he was found dead in bed, effusion into the brain having taken place. I lay the weary pen aside. And wish you health and love and mirth As fits the solemn Christmas tide, As fits the holy Christmas birth, Be this good friends, our carol still — Be peace on earth, be peace on earth, To men o£ gentle will.