Reeve's letters for several months had been leading up to the next sad entry in the Journal. For a woman of seventy-five, a serious and prolonged illness could scarcely have any other issue.
My mother's illness was approaching its melancholy end. On January 8th I sat up all night at Brompton. On the 9th she was speechless. On Sunday, the 10th, at 3 P.M., she died. On the 16th she was buried in the Brompton Cemetery. Edward James Reeve read the service. Arthur Taylor, John, Richard, John Edward, and Fairfax Taylor, Sir A, Gordon, P. Worsley, W. Wallace, J. P. Simpson, R. Lane, Dr. Fyfe, and John Cox attended.
On the 17th I went to Essex Street Chapel, where Madge preached her funeral sermon. He had preached my father's funeral sermon just fifty years before. My mother survived my father nearly fifty years. This is not the place to comment on her singular virtues!
We went to Boulogne on the 18th for the first period of mourning, and visited Amiens and Abbéville. Home on the 25th.
To Mr. Dempster
62 Rutland Gate, January 11th.—Your long kindness and friendship tell me how much I may rely on your sympathy. My dear mother expired yesterday afternoon, in perfect serenity. However long one may have anticipated such a stroke and, as I told you in July, I knew it was impending—one cannot realise it till it falls. As Gray said to Mason, 'A man has but one mother;' it is a blank that cannot be filled up. But I have the consolatory thought that my dear mother's life was complete in its usefulness, its energy, its unquenchable zeal for the good of others, its Christian endurance of sorrow and of pain; and no one ever lived in this world more fitted to enter upon another. Christine was with her to the last.
From the Duc d'Aumale
Orleans House, 11 Janvier.—Hélas! cher Monsieur; je n'ai pas de consolation à vous offrir; je ne puis que vous assurer de ma profonde sympathie. Je juge de ce que vous devez souffrir par ce que je ressentirais à votre place. Mon coeur est avec le vôtre. H. D'ORLÉANS.
From Lord Clarendon
January 11th.