Nares (Rev. Edward, "Thinks I to myself"), 1762-1841. "Good-bye."
Naruszewicz (Adam Stanislas, "The Polish Tacitus"), 1733-1796. "Must I leave it unfinished?" He referred to his "History of Poland."
Neander (Johann August, the celebrated church historian. He was of Jewish descent, but early in life embraced the Christian faith, and at his baptism assumed the name "Neander," from two Greek words signifying a new man), 1789-1850. "I am weary; I will now go to sleep. Good night!"
Nelson (Horatio), 1758-1805. "Thank God, I have done my duty." He died in battle. Some say his last words were: "Kiss me, Hardy." Others give them thus: "Tell Collingwood to bring the fleet to anchor."
His ever-memorable signal to his fleet, immediately before the battle commenced, had been; "England expects every man to do his duty," and if ever a man lived and died in earnest, fearless, unselfish discharge of his duty to his country, it was Admiral Nelson, victor of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar.—Appleton's Cyclopædia of Biography.
Nero (Lucius Domitius Claudius Cæsar, Emperor of Rome), 37-68. "Qualis artifex pereo!"
The poor wretch who, without a pang, had caused so many brave Romans and so many innocent Christians to be murdered, could not summon up resolution to die. He devised every operatic incident of which he could think. When even his most degraded slaves urged him to have sufficient manliness to save himself from the fearful infamies which otherwise awaited him, he ordered his grave to be dug, and fragments of marble to be collected for its adornment, and water and wood for his funeral pyre, perpetually whining: "What an artist to perish!" Meanwhile a courier arrived for Phaon. Nero snatched his dispatches out of his hand, and read that the Senate had decided that he should be punished in the ancestral fashion as a public enemy. Asking what the ancestral fashion was, he was informed that he would be stripped naked and scourged to death with rods, with his head thrust into a fork. Horrified at this, he seized two daggers, and after theatrically trying their edges, sheathed them again, with the excuse that the fatal moment had not yet arrived! Then he bade Sparus begin to sing his funeral song, and begged some one to show him how to die. Even his own intense shame at his cowardice was an insufficient stimulus, and he whiled away the time in vapid epigrams and pompous quotations. The sound of horses' hoofs then broke on his ears, and venting one more Greek quotation, he held the dagger to his throat. It was driven home by Epaphroditus, one of his literary slaves. At this moment the centurion who came to arrest him rushed in. Nero was not yet dead, and under pretense of helping him, the centurion began to stanch the wound with his cloak. "Too late," he said; "is this your fidelity?" So he died; and the bystanders were horrified with the way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his head in a rigid stare. He had begged that his body might be burned without posthumous insults, and this was conceded by Icelus, the freedman of Galba.
Farrar: "Early Days of Christianity."
It was the remark of Nero's father, Ahenobarbus, that nothing but what was hateful and pernicious to mankind could ever come from Agrippina and himself. Yet the story of a strange hand that strewed flowers upon the tomb of this tyrant is well known.
Newell (Harriet, missionary in India), 1793-1812. "The pains, the groans, the dying strife. How long, O Lord, how long?"