Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.
Rise, some avenger, from our blood!
Such persons realize that beautiful fiction of the ancients, who represent the swans of Cayster singing at their death; and have been compared to the nightingale singing with a thorn on its breast.
The following anecdotes are of a different complexion: they may perhaps excite a smile. We have given them the title of Grammatical Deaths.
Pere Bouhours 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 expressions, the dying critic interrupted him: “Hold your tongue,” he said, “your wretched style only makes me out of conceit with them!”
Several persons of science have died in a scientific manner.—Haller, the greatest of physicians, 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, and observed, “My friend, the artery ceases to beat,”—and almost instantly expired.
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 disposition, 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 12; the dying mathematician instantly, and perhaps without knowing that he answered it, replied, “144.”
The following lines, from the pen of Mrs. Barbauld, in an address to the Deity, express the desires and hopes of a real Christian in the contemplation of death:
“O when the last, the closing hour draws nigh,
And earth recedes before my swimming eye;
When trembling on the doubtful edge of fate,
I stand, and stretch my view to either state;
Teach me to quit this transitory scene
With decent triumph and a look serene;
Teach me to fix my ardent hopes on high,
And, having liv’d to thee, in thee to die!”
The following article is not of a pleasing description, but nevertheless proper to be inserted in “The Book of Curiosities.” It is Anthropophagi, or Men-eaters: