HAZLITT’S HOUSE. FRITH STREET.
But he was nearing the end of it all when he came to Frith Street. In August he was attacked with a violent sort of cholera, and never rallied from it. What was probably his last essay, one on “The Sick Chamber,” appeared that same month in the New Monthly, picturing his own invalid condition and touching gratefully on the consolation and enjoyment he could still derive from books. Nearing the close, he begged that his mother might be sent for, but she was an old lady of eighty-four living in Devonshire and was unable to go to him. “He died so quietly,” in the words of his grandson, “that his son, who was sitting by his bedside, did not know that he was gone till the vital breath had been extinct a moment or two. His last words were, ‘Well, I’ve had a happy life.’” The same authority adds that he found the following memorandum, in the handwriting of his grandmother: “Saturday, 18th September 1830, at about half-past four in the afternoon, died at his lodgings, No. 6 Frith Street, Soho, William Hazlitt, aged fifty-two years five months and eight days. Mr. Lamb, Mr. White, Mr. Hersey, and his own son were with him at the time.”
He was buried within a minute’s walk of his house, in the churchyard of St. Anne’s, Soho, and his tombstone removed from its first position, stands back against the wall of the church: the stone originally bore a curious, somewhat militant inscription, but this has recently been obliterated, and replaced by one that offers nothing but his name and a record of the dates of his birth and death.
CHAPTER X
A PHILOSOPHER, TWO POETS, AND A NOVELIST
Everybody has heard of Sandford and Merton, and hardly anybody nowadays has read it. I confess with shame that I am one who has not. But I have come across so many parodies of it and so many references to it in various books and articles that I am finding it more and more difficult to believe that I have not actually read the story itself. Mr. Barlow, the boy’s tutor, lives in my mind as a large and solemn bore, but he was a bore of real knowledge; he was heavy with learning; and the boys themselves were dreadful little prigs, but underneath their priggishness they were manly boys, and there was something fine in their ideals of honour. No doubt they were largely modelled on their author, Thomas Day, who when he was a schoolboy started a fight with another boy on quite justifiable grounds, and soon finding that he completely outmatched his opponent, stopped the fight, and insisted on shaking hands with the other and making peace.
That incident, and the queer originality of his whole outlook on life, has made me more interested in Day himself than in his one famous book, and has made me number 36 Wellclose Square, the house where he was born, among the London literary shrines that must not be overlooked.