The functions of the mind are connected with those of the body. On a death-bed a fortnight’s disease may reduce the firmest to a most wretched state; while, on the contrary, the soul struggles, as it were in torture, in a robust frame. Nani, the Venetian historian, has curiously described the death of Innocent the Tenth, who was a character unblemished by vices, and who died at an advanced age, with too robust a constitution. Dopo lunga e terribile agonia, con dolore e con pena, seperandosi l’anima da quel corpo robusto, egli spiro ai sette di Genuaro, nel ottantesimo primo de suoi anno. “After a long and terrible agony, with great bodily pain and difficulty, his soul separated itself from that robust frame, and expired in his eighty-first year.”
Some have composed sermons on death, while they passed many years of anxiety, approaching to madness, in contemplating their own. The certainty of an immediate separation from all our human sympathies may, even on a death-bed suddenly disorder the imagination. The great physician of our times told me of a general, who had often faced the cannon’s mouth, dropping down in terror, when informed by him that his disease was rapid and fatal. Some have died of the strong imagination of death. There is a print of a knight brought on the scaffold to suffer; he viewed the headsman; he was blinded, and knelt down to receive the stroke. Having passed through the whole ceremony of a criminal execution, accompanied by all its disgrace, it was ordered that his life should be spared. Instead of the stroke from the sword, they poured cold water over his neck. After this operation the knight remained motionless; they discovered that he had expired in the very imagination of death! Such are among the many causes which may affect the mind in the hour of its last trial. The habitual associations of the natural character are most likely to prevail, though not always. The intrepid Marshal Biron disgraced his exit by womanish tears and raging imbecility; the virtuous Erasmus, with miserable groans, was heard crying out, Domine! Domine! fac finem! fac finem! Bayle having prepared his proof for the printer, pointed to where it lay, when dying. The last words which Lord Chesterfield was heard to speak were, when the valet, opening the curtains of the bed, announced Mr. Dayroles, “Give Dayroles a chair!” “This good breeding,” observed the late Dr. Warren, his physician, “only quits him with his life.” The last words of Nelson were, “Tell Collingwood to bring the fleet to an anchor.” The tranquil grandeur which cast a new majesty over Charles the First on the scaffold, appeared when he declared, “I fear not death! Death is not terrible to me!” And the characteristic pleasantry of Sir Thomas More exhilarated his last moments, when, observing the weakness of the scaffold, he said, in mounting it, “I pray you, see me up safe, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself!” Sir Walter Rawleigh passed a similar jest when going to the scaffold.[131]
My ingenious friend Dr. Sherwen has furnished me with the following anecdotes of death:—In one of the bloody battles fought by the Duke d’Enghien, two French noblemen were left wounded among the dead on the field of battle. One complained loudly of his pains; the other, after long silence, thus offered him consolation: “My friend, whoever you are, remember that our God died on the cross, our king on the scaffold; and if you have strength to look at him who now speaks to you, you will see that both his legs are shot away.”
At the murder of the Duke d’Enghien, the royal victim looking at the soldiers, who had pointed their fusees, said, “Grenadiers! lower your arms, otherwise you will miss, or only wound me!” To two of them who proposed to tie a handkerchief over his eyes, he said, “A loyal soldier who has been so often exposed to fire and sword can see the approach of death with naked eyes and without fear.”
After a similar caution on the part of Sir George Lisle, or Sir Charles Lucas, when murdered in nearly the same manner at Colchester, by the soldiers of Fairfax, the loyal hero, in answer to their assertions and assurances that they would take care not to miss him, nobly replied, “You have often missed me when I have been nearer to you in the field of battle.”
When the governor of Cadiz, the Marquis de Solano, was murdered by the enraged and mistaken citizens, to one of his murderers, who had run a pike through his back, he calmly turned round and said, “Coward, to strike there! Come round—if you dare face—and destroy me!”
Abernethy, in his Physiological Lectures, has ingeniously observed that “Shakspeare has represented Mercutio continuing to jest, though conscious that he was mortally wounded; the expiring Hotspur thinking of nothing but honour; and the dying Falstaff still cracking his jests upon Bardolph’s nose. If such facts were duly attended to, they would prompt us to make a more liberal allowance for each other’s conduct, under certain circumstances, than we are accustomed to do.” The truth seems to be, that whenever the functions of the mind are not disturbed by “the nervous functions of the digestive organs,” the personal character predominates even in death, and its habitual associations exist to its last moments. Many religious persons may have died without showing in their last moments any of those exterior acts, or employing those fervent expressions, which the collector of “The Book of Death” would only deign to chronicle; their hope is not gathered in their last hour.
Yet many have delighted to taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnel-house is the scene of their pleasure. The “Midnight Meditations” of Quarles preceded Young’s “Night Thoughts” by a century, and both these poets loved preternatural terror.
| If I must die, I’ll snatch at everything That may but mind me of my latest breath; Death’s-heads, Graves, Knells, Blacks,[132] tombs, all these shall bring Into my soul such useful thoughts of death, That this sable king of fears Shall not catch me unawares.—Quarles. |
But it may be doubtful whether the thoughts of death are useful, whenever they put a man out of the possession of his faculties. Young pursued the scheme of Quarles: he raised about him an artificial emotion of death: he darkened his sepulchral study, placing a skull on his table by lamp-light; as Dr. Donne had his portrait taken, first winding a sheet over his head and closing his eyes; keeping this melancholy picture by his bed-side as long as he lived, to remind him of his mortality[133]. Young, even in his garden, had his conceits of death: at the end of an avenue was viewed a seat of an admirable chiaro-oscuro, which, when approached, presented only a painted surface, with an inscription, alluding to the deception of the things of this world. To be looking at “the mirror which flatters not;” to discover ourselves only as a skeleton with the horrid life of corruption about us, has been among those penitential inventions, which have often ended in shaking the innocent by the pangs which are only natural to the damned.[134] Without adverting to those numerous testimonies, the diaries of fanatics, I shall offer a picture of an accomplished and innocent lady, in a curious and unaffected transcript she has left of a mind of great sensibility, where the preternatural terror of death might perhaps have hastened the premature one she suffered.