In September, 1750, another codicil added to the list of Visitors—in order to supply vacancies which death had already wrought—the Earls of Macclesfield and Shelburne, and the then Master of the Rolls, Sir John Strange, with proviso of succession for the Master of the Rolls of the time being. Sir John Bernard, Sir William Calvert, and Mr. Slingsby Bethel were, in like manner, added to the roll of Trustees. The same codicil excepted the advowson of the Rectory of Chelsea from the bequest of 1749, and annexed it to the lordship of the Manor.
By his marriage with the daughter and heiress of Mr. Langley, an Alderman of London, Sir Hans Sloane had issue two daughters, but no son. The elder of the daughters, Sarah Sloane, married George Stanley, of Poultons, in Hampshire; the younger, Elizabeth, married Lord Cadogan. By the representatives of those co-heiresses the large inheritance was eventually enjoyed.
A subsequent codicil of 1751, added nine other Trustees, five of whom were distinguished foreigners. Among the four English names are those of John Hampden (‘twenty-fourth hereditary lord of Great Hampden,’ and last lineal male descendant of that famous stock) and William Sotheby.
The Closing Years.
The declining years of a man to whom had been given, not only unusual length of days, but an unusual span both of bodily and of mental vigour, so that he remained in the rank of busy men until he had passed his eightieth year, were necessarily days of seclusion. He had enjoyed not only the honours[[52]] and the comforts, but the troop of friends which should accompany old age. Yet a man who reaches the age of ninety-two must needs lose the friends of his maturity, as well as the friends of his youth. Sir Hans Sloane, in the old Manor House of Chelsea, had something of the experience which made a famous statesman of our own day, who was loth to leave the stir of London life, say—with a sigh—‘I see all the world passing my windows, but few come in.’
His chief recreations, in those latest years, lay in the continued examination of the stores of nature and of art which never palled upon his capacity of enjoyment, and in the regular weekly visit of a much younger man, who was very conversant in the busy world without; who could talk, and talk well, alike upon public events, upon the novelties of science, and upon the gossip of the coffee-houses and the clubs. This friend of old age was George Edwards, a naturalist of considerable acquirements, and the author of some Essays on Natural History which are still worth reading.
Sloane’s mental vigour long outlived his power of bodily locomotion. For years he could move from room to room, or on very bright days from room to garden, only by the aid of an invalid chair. In other respects, his health gave a weighty sanction to the counsel which he had been wont to give, not infrequently, in lieu of an invited but superfluous prescription. ‘I advise you’ he would say, ‘to what I practice myself. I never take physic when I am well. When I am ill, I take little, and only such as has been very well tried.’
The end of a bright, abundant, and most useful life, came at the beginning of the year 1753. On the tenth of January, George Edwards found him rapidly sinking, and suffering greatly. On the eleventh he found him at the point of death. ‘I continued with him,’ he wrote, ‘later than any one of his relatives. But I was obliged to retire—his last agonies being beyond what I could bear; although, under his pain and weakness of body, he seemed to retain a great firmness of mind and resignation to the will of God.’ He was buried at Chelsea, in the same vault in which, twenty-eight years before, he had buried his wife.
Synoptical Tables of the Sloane Museum.
This indefatigable collector had continued to enrich his Museum with new accessions as long as he lived. We have the means of estimating its growth—as regards mere numbers, of course—by comparing a synoptical table drawn up in 1725—for the purpose of showing to certain grumblers what had been the nature and aim of those avocations which had delayed the completion of the Natural History of Jamaica—with another table drawn up by his Trustees immediately after his death.