Haweis's "Music and Morals."
Haydon (Benjamin Robert, English artist), 1786-1846. His last recorded words were, "God forgive me.—Amen!" Haydon took his own life in a moment of great mental depression.
At dinner he got up from his chair and turned a glazed picture to the wall; his brain could not bear the reflected light. He looked flushed and haggard, and passed a silent and abstracted evening. That night he was heard walking about his room nearly the whole night, apparently in great agitation. It was in those wakeful hours he settled his resolve. He was dressed and out of his room early the next morning (22d June), and walked down, before breakfast, to Rivière, a gunmaker in Oxford Street, near Regent Street. Here he bought one of a pair of pistols. He came home about 9 a. m., breakfasted alone, then went to his painting-room, and probably wrote the letters to his children, his will, and his "last thoughts." As his mother and sister passed the painting-room door on their way to their rooms, about 10:30 a. m., they tried the door—it was locked—and he called out very fiercely, "Who's there?" A few minutes after, as if regretting the tone in which he had spoken, he came up to his mother's room, kissed her affectionately, and lingered about the room as if he had something to say. But he said little, except to ask her to call that day on an old friend (one of the executors he had just named in his will) and, returned to his painting-room, deliberately wrote in his journal:—
"God forgive me.—Amen!"
In a few moments he had destroyed himself.
Stoddard: "Haydon's Life, Letters and Table Talk."
Hazlitt (William, essayist and critic), 1778-1830. "I have led a happy life."
Heine (Heinrich, German poet and author), 1800-1856. "Set your mind at rest, Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son métrer."
Some hours before he died a friend came into his room to see him once more. Soon after his entry he asked Heine if he was on good terms with God. "Set your mind at rest," said Heine, "Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son métrer."
Stigand: "Life, Work and Opinions of Heine."