Contrasted with its brilliant beginning the close of Mrs. Jordan’s life is painfully sad, and it might be urged that the sorrowful end was but an instance of retributive justice on account of the fair and frail one’s social sin. Experience, however, proves that the breaking of the moral law does not always involve punishment in this life, and even if this were not so, many instances could be cited of misfortunes as heavy, and far heavier, falling to the lot of those who to all intents and purposes have led blameless lives.
Foremost among such cases would be the crushing blow that befell the noble and greatly gifted novelist and poet, Sir Walter Scott, at the age of fifty-five years, when, having given to the world the greater part of those glorious works that have placed his name pre-eminent in the world of literature, and being, as was supposed, the happy enjoyer of a handsome fortune and splendid estate, it transpired that he was a ruined man. So successful had been his literary labours for thirty years that it was generally and naturally supposed that the enormous sums spent on Abbotsford were the proceeds of his novels and poems, but it seems he had for a long time been a partner in the printing firm of Ballantyne & Co., who were closely connected with Messrs. Constable, the publishers. These firms had engaged in transactions of a speculative character, and in the commercial crisis of 1825 both failed, Sir Walter’s immense private fortune being swallowed up in the crash, while as a partner in the house of Ballantyne he was responsible for the enormous amount of £147,000. At the time of this calamity his health had already been considerably shattered, the slightly grey hair had in the year 1819 been turned to snowy white by an attack of jaundice, and his frame further enfeebled four years later by an attack of apoplexy, so that it would not have been surprising if this frightful crash had proved his death-blow. Far from it; with a heroism unparalleled, and a high sense of honour, that adds more lustre to his name than the most brilliant effusion of his pen, he determined manfully to face this overwhelming catastrophe, refusing all proffered aid, and merely asking for time. “Gentlemen,” said he to the creditors, “time and I against any two. Let me take this good ally into my company, and I believe I shall be able to pay you every farthing. It is very hard thus to lose all the labours of a lifetime and to be made a poor man at last when I ought to have been otherwise, but, if God grant me life and strength for a few years longer, I have no doubt I shall redeem it all.” The redemption referred to his property, all of which he gave up, retiring into modest lodgings, where he zealously set to work to accomplish the Herculean task of writing off the gigantic sum named. ‘Woodstock,’ which realised £8228, was the first novel after his misfortune, and that occupied him only three months; but it was as, he said, “very hard” at his time of life to every day perform the allotted task of producing thirty pages of printed matter, for the work on which he was then occupied was not that fiction which he wrote with such facility, but a voluminous ‘Life of Napoleon Buonaparte,’ necessitating reference to no end of books and papers; and day after day for many a month might he have been seen, slowly and sorrowfully, wading through work after work in order to verify each date and fact. The nine volumes were finished in 1827, and these were followed by ‘The Chronicles of the Canongate,’ ‘Tales of a Grandfather,’ ‘The Fair Maid of Perth,’ ‘Count Robert,’ and ‘Castle Dangerous’—the last named published in 1831—a year before his death, which may be fairly attributed to the undue strain of mind and body; the raison-d’être of this overtaxing of his strength being simply and solely impecuniosity.
The picture of this truly great man being obliged to wear out the last years of his life by unceasing labour when he should have been enjoying a well-earned rest, is excessively sad and touching—but the sadness is to some extent relieved by the heroic nature of the act. The melancholy end of the man is swallowed up in the imperishable name he has left behind, which name, for generations to come, will serve as the synonym of honour. Sad, far more sad, were the closing days of Sheridan, whose last moments were also darkened by impecuniosity, but utterly unrelieved by any acts of self-sacrifice; and made far more melancholy by the fact that the monetary misery was caused by unnecessary extravagance.
Alas, poor Sheridan! If ever man in his declining days had good reason to say with the preacher, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” thou hadst! for thou wert bitterly punished at the last, by the desertion and neglect of those who should have succoured and solaced thee. True thy shortcomings were many, but only one blessed with such brilliant gifts could possibly realise thy temptation; and the sorrow thou didst endure must silence detraction. Says one of his biographers, “For six years after the burning of the old theatre, he continued to go down and down. Disease now attacked him fiercely. In the spring of 1816 he was fast waning towards extinction. His day was past, he had outlived his fame as a wit and social light; he was forgotten by many, if not by most, of his old associates. He wrote to Rogers, ‘I am absolutely undone and broken-hearted.’ Poor Sheridan! in spite of all thy faults, who is he whose morality is so stern that he cannot shed one tear over thy latter days! God forgive us, we are all sinners; and if we weep not for this man’s deficiency, how shall we ask tears when our day comes? Even as I write, I feel my hand tremble and my eyes moisten over the sad end of one whom I love, though he died before I was born. ‘They are going to put the carpets out of window,’ he wrote to Rogers, ‘and break into Mrs. S.’s room and take me. For God’s sake let me see you!’ See him! see one friend who could and would help him in his misery! Oh, happy man may that man count himself who has never wanted that one friend, and felt the utter helplessness of that want. Poor Sheridan! had he ever asked, or hoped, or looked for that Friend out of this world it had been better; for ‘the Lord thy God is a jealous God,’ and we go on seeking human friendship and neglecting the divine till it is too late. He found one hearty friend in his physician, Dr. Bain, when all others had forsaken him. The spirit of White’s and Brookes’, the companion of a prince and a score of noblemen, the enlivener of every fashionable table, was forgotten by all but this one doctor. Let us read Moore’s description. ‘A sheriff’s officer at length arrested the dying man in his bed, and was about to carry him off in his blankets to a spunging-house, when Dr. Bain interfered?’ Who would live the life of revelry that Sheridan lived to have such an end? A few days after, on the 7th July, 1816, in his sixty-fifth year, he died. Of his last hours the late Professor Smythe wrote an admirable and most touching account, a copy of which was circulated in manuscript. The professor, hearing of Sheridan’s condition asked to see him, with a view not only of alleviating present distress, but of calling the dying man to repentance. From his hands the unhappy Sheridan received the Holy Communion; his face during that solemn rite—doubly solemn when it is performed in the chamber of death—‘expressed,’ Smythe relates, ‘the deepest awe.’ That phrase conveys to the mind impressions not easy to be defined, not easy to be forgotten.
“Peace! There was not peace even in death, and the creditor pursued him even into the ‘waste wide,’ even to the coffin. He was lying in state, when a gentleman in the deepest mourning called, it is said, at the house, and introducing himself as an old and much-attached friend of the deceased, begged to be allowed to look upon his face. The tears which rose in his eyes, the tremulousness of his quiet voice, the pallor of his mournful face, deceived the unsuspecting servant, who accompanied him to the chamber of death, removed the lid of the coffin, turned down the shroud, and revealed features which had once been handsome, but long since rendered almost hideous by drinking. The stranger gazed with profound emotion, while he quietly drew from his pocket a bailiff’s wand, and touching the corpse’s face with it, suddenly altered his manner to one of considerable glee, and informed the servant that he had arrested the corpse in the King’s name for a debt of £500. It was the morning of the funeral, which was to be attended by half the grandees of England, and in a few minutes the mourners began to arrive. But the corpse was the bailiff’s property till his claim was paid, and nought but the money would soften the iron capturer. Canning and Lord Sidmouth agreed to settle the matter, and over the coffin the debt was paid.”
The pall-bearers were the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Lauderdale, Earl Mulgrave, Lord Holland, Lord Spencer, and the Bishop of London, and the body was followed by two Royal Highnesses—the Dukes of York and Sussex—by two Marquises, seven Earls, three Viscounts, five Lords, and a perfect army of honourables and right honourables. This show of respect and homage after death, when nothing had been done to assuage his last sufferings in life, was regarded by those who loved him as a bitter mockery, and Moore’s lines justly denounced it.
“Oh, it sickens the heart to see bosoms so hollow,
And friendship so false in the great and high-born,
To think what a long line of titles may follow,
The relics of him who died friendless and lorn!
How proud they can press to the funeral array
Of him whom they shunned in his sickness and sorrow,
How bailiffs may seize his last blanket to-day,
Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow!”