Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière—
Here, at this pathetic line, was André Chenier summoned to the guillotine! Never was a more beautiful effusion of grief interrupted by a more affecting incident!
Several men of science have died in a scientific manner. Haller, the poet, philosopher, and physician, beheld his end approach with the utmost composure. He kept feeling his pulse to the last moment, and when he found that life was almost gone, he turned to his brother physician, observing, "My friend, the artery ceases to beat," and almost instantly expired. The same remarkable circumstance had occurred to the great Harvey: he kept making observations on the state of his pulse, when life was drawing to its close, "as if," says Dr. Wilson, in the oration spoken a few days after the event, "that he who had taught us the beginning of life might himself, at his departing from it, become acquainted with those of death."
De Lagny, who was intended by his friends for the study of the law, having fallen on an Euclid, found it so congenial to his dispositions, that he devoted himself to mathematics. In his last moments, when he retained no further recollection of the friends who surrounded his bed, one of them, perhaps to make a philosophical experiment, thought proper to ask him the square of twelve: our dying mathematician instantly, and perhaps without knowing that he answered, replied, "One hundred and forty-four."
The following anecdotes are of a different complexion, and may excite a smile.
Père Bohours was a French grammarian, who had been justly accused of paying too scrupulous an attention to the minutiæ of letters. He was more solicitous of his words than his thoughts. It is said, that when he was dying, he called out to his friends (a correct grammarian to the last), "Je VAS ou je VAIS mourir; l'un ou l'autre se dit!"
When Malherbe was dying, he reprimanded his nurse for making use of a solecism in her language; and when his confessor represented to him the felicities of a future state in low and trite expressions, the dying critic interrupted him:—"Hold your tongue," he said; "your wretched style only makes me out of conceit with them!"
The favourite studies and amusements of the learned La Mothe le Vayer consisted in accounts of the most distant countries. He gave a striking proof of the influence of this master-passion, when death hung upon his lips. Bernier, the celebrated traveller, entering and drawing the curtains of his bed to take his eternal farewell, the dying man turning to him, with a faint voice inquired, "Well, my friend, what news from the Great Mogul?"