So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, “O thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave!” Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance to the wish, “May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and having the melancholy office to close his.” And to his “dear little niece,” Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland Burke): “May you see your son a support to your old age; ... and at a very long day may he close your eyes, not as I have done those of your admirable cousin.” His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir Thomas Browne, in his meditations on man: “he may go out of the world less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself; orbity may be his inheritance.”
Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian; for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary religious dynasty, but it affected his claims to pre-eminent favour with God. “Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on the loss of his favourite boy, ... was accursed of heaven, and a special Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet.” Bitterly Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising son Emeric—the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end. Like the desolate sire in Scott’s poem who
... “beheld aghast,
With Wilfrid all his projects pass,
All turn’d and centred on his son,
On Wilfrid all—and he was gone.
‘And I am childless now,’ he said.”
Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last representative of his race. Southey observes that Pauli in domo præter se nemo superest, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician, he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was often in the Doctor’s mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling.
Michelet’s record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, “All that fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had taken effect.” So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one’s children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man.
Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis Vere’s three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of Ormond, that he outlived “the noble-minded Ossory,” worthy son of such a sire.