On New Year’s Day, 1852, Sir Charles Wager Watson, of Westwratting Park, while riding briskly to meet the Suffolk foxhounds, fell from his horse, and on his friends coming up, they found him dead. On April 5, Prince Schwartzenberg was holding a Cabinet council, when he suddenly appeared to gasp for breath, and withdrew: he rallied, and retired to dress for dinner, during which he fell senseless on the floor, and died within an hour from his first seizure.
Mr. Frank Forster, the engineer, on April 13, while writing a letter, was struck with apoplexy, and almost immediately expired. A. N. Welby Pugin, the architect, scarcely of mature age, died suddenly at Ramsgate, September 14; and on the same day, the Duke of Wellington, who had retired to rest apparently quite well on the previous night, died, it is stated of apoplexy, within the brief space of six or seven hours. Dr. Granville states, from the testimony of medical and other near attendants, that, from the very first seizure, when the duke ordered distinctly the apothecary to be fetched immediately, down to the last moment of his existence, paralysis of the brain had been complete, for no other comprehensible word could he utter after that direction. On the day before, Dr. Stokoe, the appointed medical attendant to Napoleon I., during the last years of his exile, died suddenly in a public room at York, as he was preparing to continue his journey to London.
On March 12, 1853, Marshal Haynau, having supped with the prime minister, Buol, retired to rest, when, just after midnight, he rang for a glass of water; when the servant returned, his master was gasping for breath, and soon after died. On the same night, the gallant Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Kerrison was found dead in his bed. And, not many days after, Vice-Admiral Zarthmann, while walking in the streets of Copenhagen, complained of vertigo, sank to the ground, and expired in an hour. On April 30, Dr. Butler, Dean of Peterborough, while seated at table with his family, suddenly became insensible, and in ten minutes passed away, almost without a struggle. Maurice O’Connell, the eldest son of “the Liberator,” appeared in his usual health in the House of Commons; on the morrow, at midnight, he breathed his last. On December 12, 1853, Dr. Harrington, Principal of Brazenose College, Oxford, having retired to rest in his usual health and spirits, was shortly after seized with spasms, and died before eight o’clock next morning, in his fifty-third year. On the 5th of the same month, Captain Warner, of the “long range,” expired suddenly. On a Sunday evening in the same month, a stout middle-aged yeoman was crossing Ovington Park, near Southampton, on his way to the church, which he never reached: the park-keeper found him seated with his back to a tree, his hat on, his umbrella under his arm—dead—with no appearance of convulsion or previous struggle. Visconti, the architect, on December 29, had attended the first meeting of the Imperial Commission for the Exposition building at Paris, and was returning home in his carriage: on the door being opened, he was found dead.
One of the most awfully sudden visitations recorded in our time was the death of Mr. Justice Talfourd, in his fifty-eighth year, March 13, 1845, at Stafford, while delivering his charge to the grand jury. He was speaking of the increase of crime—of the neglects of the rich, the ignorance of the poor—of the want of a closer knowledge and more vital sympathy between class and class—and of the thousand social evils which arise from that unhappy and unnatural estrangement of human interests—when his face flushed and he bent forward on his desk, almost as if the Judge were bowed in prayer by some sharp and overpowering emotion. A moment more, and the bystanders saw him swerve, as if he were already senseless. He was dying, calmly and happily. In a few seconds he was gone—and all that was mortal of the poet was carried to the Judges’ Chambers and there laid down in breathless awe. “The people were trembling at the thought of coming before him; but in a minute his function was over, and he was gone to his own account.”
Respecting the frequency of these fatal occurrences, Dr. Granville remarks: “Where is the friend, where the acquaintance, or the passing associate at a club, who has not some sad story of the sort, or many of them, to tell you, if you once enter on the dismal subject? From every quarter of the country, from families whom you knew to be in the full bloom of youth, of individuals who were deemed vigorous and in the flower of manhood, we hear as we meet in our daily intercourse, of some one of them having suddenly disappeared from among the living!” Our newspapers abound with such records as the following.
In 1837, a communication to a Bristol journal recorded
“The fearfully sudden decease of Thomas Kington, Esq., of Manilla hall, Clifton. Apparently without the slightest indisposition he died in his counting-house, Queen-square, Bristol, surrounded by all the accumulations of wealth, and the advantages accruing from the interests of that wide range of commerce, the Melbourne and Australian trade.”
And, in the Times, June, 1862:
“On the 19th inst., at Nine Elms, very suddenly, Mr. John Miller, on the anniversary of his birth and wedding days, which events he had intended to celebrate at the Star and Garter, Richmond, where he had gone with a few friends, but was suddenly attacked with illness on his arrival there, and was re-conveyed to his own residence, where he expired shortly afterwards, aged fifty.”