He was not more fortunate in a second marriage than he had been in his first. The vain confidence which he placed in his good stars on this occasion shall be told in his own words, which are as follows:
While he was deeply engaged in his biographical compositions he used to say, 'I have not leisure to wander from my hermitage, and look into the world in quest of a wife; but I feel a strong persuasion that if it is really good for me to venture once more on marriage,
that step Of deepest hazard and of highest hope,
my kind stars will conduct to my cell some compassionate fair one, fond of books and retirement, who may be willing to enliven, with the songs of tenderness, the solitude of a poetical hermit.'
Such was the frame of mind in the recluse when an incident occurred, that gradually seemed to accomplish a completion of his prophecy. This incident was a visit from an old ecclesiastical acquaintance, attended by two young ladies, Mary and Harriet Welford, daughters of an aged and retired merchant on Blackheath.
The countenance and musical talents of the elder sister made a strong impression on the sequestered poet. Their accidental visit gradually led to his second marriage, on the 23d of March 1809, an event attended with much general exultation and delight, though evidently, like the usual steps of poets in the world, rather a step of hasty affection than of deliberate prudence.
In three years they were separated; I know not for what reasons. On shewing me some gaps in his library, he said that they had been made by proceedings in Doctors Commons.
To Felpham where he passed the last twenty years of his life, there retired also, to end his days in privacy and quiet, Doctor Cyril Jackson, who had been many years Dean of Christ Church, and in that time had refused some of the highest honours in the church. It is said that when Hayley waited on him, the Doctor declined entering upon an interchange of visits; but said that he should be happy to establish an intercourse of a different kind, and to send him occasionally books, or anything else which he might happen to have, and which Hayley might be without, and to receive from him the same neighbourly accommodations in return. Accordingly when the poet took a wife in his old age, he sent the Doctor a piece of the wedding cake, with a message, that he hoped at some future time to receive a neighbourly communication of the same sort in return.
In 1818, he told me that his medical attendant was apprehensive of his becoming dropsical, and had prescribed him a glass of port wine after his dinner. His usual drink before this had been water. In the October of the following year he wrote to me that "he had been assailed by two of the most formidable enemies of the human frame; and had been almost demolished by a fit of apoplexy, and a fit of the stone: the blow from the former," he adds, "was so violent, that my physician despaired of my revival; but, by the mercy of Heaven, I am so far revived, that I can again enjoy a social and literary intercourse with my friends; and even dabble again in rhyme; but, as I suspect, that my rhymes, like the Homilies of Gil Blas' Archbishop, may savour of apoplexy, I think it right to keep them in utter privacy."
His other complaint the stone, terminated his life on the 12th of
November, 1820.