48. The last years of his life were spent at the residence of Mr. Osgood in Andover. For a brief season it seemed as though his reason was restored. He even undertook a case in the Court of Common Pleas in Boston, but found himself unequal to the exertion demanded of him.
49. He had been persuaded to dine with Governor Hancock and some other friends. "But the presence of his former friends and the revived memories of previous events, gave a great shock to his broken mind." He was persuaded to go back at once to the residence of Mr. Osgood.
50. After his mind had become unsettled he said to Mrs. Warren, "My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash of lightning," and this wish he often repeated.
51. Six weeks exactly after his return, on May 23, 1783, while standing in the side doorway during a thunder-shower, with his cane in his hand, and telling the assembled family a story, he was struck by lightning and instantly killed. Not one of the seven or eight persons in the room was injured. "No mark of any kind could be found on Otis, nor was there the slightest change or convulsion on his features."
52. His remains were brought to Boston and interred in the Granary Burying Ground with every mark of respect, a great number of the citizens attending his funeral.
53. James Otis sowed the seeds of liberty in this new world without living to see the harvest, and probably without ever dreaming what magnificent crops would be produced.
54. When the usurpations of un-English parliamentarians and their allies at home, became as burdensome, as they were unjust he defended his countrymen, in whose veins flowed the best of English blood, with an eloquence whose ultimate influence transcended his own sublime aspirations.
55. He taught, in the ominous words, which King James's first House of Commons addressed to the House of Lords, immediately after the monarch had been lecturing them on his own prerogative, that "There may be a People without a king;, but there can be no king without a people."
56. "Fortunately for civil liberty in England and America, in all countries and in all times," as Edward Everett Hale says, "none of the Stuarts ever learned in time what this ominous sentence means—ot James I, the most foolish of them, nor Charles I, the most false; nor Charles II, the most worthless; nor James II, the most obstinate."
57. It could be said of Otis as Coleridge said of O'Connell, "See how triumphant in debate and action he is. And why? Because he asserts a broad principle, acts up to it, rests his body upon it, and has faith in it."