His wife nursed him devotedly, and a favourite sister of his came to help her. Afterwards it was of consolation to the widow to remember that no hired nurse had been by his bedside, and that they had been able to do everything for him themselves. One thing troubled him as he lay dying; it was the thought of a picture which he had not been able to complete in time for the exhibition. A friend and former pupil finished it, and brought it to his bedside. He said with a smile, 'Take it away, it will do now.'
To the last he imagined that he was painting upon this picture, and he moved his arms as though he were at work. His illness was inflammation of the brain. He was only forty-five when he died, and he was buried in St. Paul's, and laid by Sir Joshua, his great master.
The portrait of Opie, as it is engraved in Alan Cunningham's Life, is that of a simple, noble-looking man, with a good thoughtful face and a fine head. Northcote, Nollekens, Horne Tooke, all his friends spoke warmly of him. 'A man of powerful understanding and ready apprehension,' says one. 'Mr. Opie crowds more wisdom into a few words than almost anybody I ever saw,' says another. 'I do not say that he was always right,' says Northcote; 'but he always put your thoughts into a new track that was worth following.' Some two years after his death the lectures which had cost so much were published, with a memoir by Mrs. Opie. Sir James Mackintosh has written one of his delightful criticisms upon the book:—
The cultivation of every science and the practice of every art are in fact a species of action, and require ardent zeal and unshaken courage…. Originality can hardly exist without vigour of character…. The discoverer or inventor may indeed be most eminently wanting in decision in the general concerns of life, but he must possess it in those pursuits in which he is successful. Opie is a remarkable instance of the natural union of these superior qualities, both of which he possesses in a high degree…. He is inferior in elegance to Sir Joshua, but he is superior in strength; he strikes more, though he charms less…. Opie is by turns an advocate, a controvertist, a panegyrist, a critic; Sir Joshua more uniformly fixes his mind on general and permanent principles, and certainly approaches more nearly to the elevation and tranquillity which seem to characterise the philosophic teacher of an elegant art.
IX.
Mrs. Opie went back, soon after her husband's death, to Norwich, to her early home, her father's house; nor was she a widow indeed while she still had this tender love and protection.
That which strikes one most as one reads the accounts of Mrs. Opie is the artlessness and perfect simplicity of her nature. The deepest feeling of her life was her tender love for her father, and if she remained younger than most women do, it may have been partly from the great blessing which was hers so long, that of a father's home. Time passed, and by degrees she resumed her old life, and came out and about among her friends. Sorrow does not change a nature, it expresses certain qualities which have been there all along.
So Mrs. Opie came up to London once more, and welcomed and was made welcome by many interesting people. Lord Erskine is her friend always; she visits Madame de Staël; she is constantly in company with Sydney Smith, the ever-welcome as she calls him. Lord Byron, Sheridan, Lord Dudley, all appear upon her scene. There is a pretty story of her singing her best to Lady Sarah Napier, old, blind, and saddened, but still happy in that she had her sons to guide and to protect her steps. Among her many entertainments, Mrs. Opie amusingly describes a dinner at Sir James Mackintosh's, to which most of the guests had been asked at different hours, varying from six to half-past seven, when Baron William von Humboldt arrives. He writes to her next day, calling her Mademoiselle Opie, 'no doubt from my juvenile appearance,' she adds, writing to her father. It is indeed remarkable to read of her spirits long after middle life, her interest and capacity for amusement. She pays 4l. for a ticket to a ball given to the Duke of Wellington; she describes this and many other masquerades and gaieties, and the blue ball, and the pink ball, and the twenty-seven carriages at her door, and her sight of the Emperor of Russia in her hotel. When the rest of the ladies crowd round, eager to touch his clothes, Mrs. Opie, carried away by the general craze, encircles his wrist with her finger and thumb. Apart from these passing fancies, she is in delightful society.
Baron Alderson, her cousin and friend, was always kind and affectionate to her. The pretty little story is well known of his taking her home in her Quaker dress in the Judges' state-coach at Norwich, saying, 'Come, Brother Opie,' as he offered her his arm to lead her to the carriage. She used to stay at his house in London, and almost the last visit she ever paid was to him.
One of the most interesting of her descriptions is that of her meeting with Sir Walter Scott and with Wordsworth at a breakfast in Mount Street, and of Sir Walter's delightful talk and animated stories. One can imagine him laughing and describing a Cockney's terrors in the Highlands, when the whole hunt goes galloping down the crags, as is their North-country fashion. 'The gifted man,' says Mrs. Opie, with her old-fashioned adjectives, 'condescended to speak to me of my "Father and Daughter." He then went on faithfully to praise his old friend Joanna Baillie and her tragedies, and to describe a tragedy he once thought of writing himself. He should have had no love in it. His hero should have been the uncle of his heroine, a sort of misanthrope, with only one affection in his heart, love for his niece, like a solitary gleam of sunshine lighting the dark tower of some ruined and lonely dwelling.'