“Unable to bear the sight of a place where such afflictions had overtaken him, he removed to Beyrout, a seaport of some consequence even at that time, although much more so now, and there, with his son and a faithful servant, he opened a small shop, stocked with such wares as he could procure without much advance of capital. But here again he was unsuccessful; for, his son becoming answerable for the debts of a man who had befriended him, and being unable to pay, his father’s little all was disposed of to save him from prison, and by degrees beggary overtook them. He then engaged himself as clerk to a merchant, next turned schoolmaster, until his sight failing him, he at last became stone-blind, and, in despair, he resolved to quit a country, where, in spite of his exertions, his position every day had grown worse and worse.
“Accordingly, he embarked with his son for Damietta in a vessel where there were fourteen passengers besides himself, and among them two divers, people who get a living on these coasts by diving for sponges, which they bring up from the bottom of the sea. It was the winter season, and the weather proved tempestuous. In crossing the bar of Damietta, where the current of the Nile, opposed to the waves of the sea, often makes a dangerous surf, the vessel foundered, and every soul perished, except the old man, who, when the others took to the boat, being blind, was unable to shift for himself, and clung to the wreck, from which he was removed the day afterwards.
“Struck with the singular decrees of Providence, that an old blind man should have escaped the dangers of the sea where even divers were drowned, he piously raised his eyes to Heaven and said, ‘I see where my fault has been: I have relied on my own exertions and the help of man, when I should have trusted in God alone. Henceforth I will put my faith in him, and nobody else.’ His peculiar case became known among the merchants of Damietta, and a subscription was made for him; so that, in a few days, he had more money at his disposal than all his friends, and all his exertions, when he looked to them alone, had ever procured for him. His serenity of mind returned: a small but sufficient subsistence was secured to him; and he spent the remainder of his days in pious gratitude to the Almighty, whose wholesome chastisements had brought him to a proper sense of the futility of human plans, unless we confide in his goodness to second our endeavours.”
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The late Countess Stanhope.
[19] “Lord Wellesley returned from his glorious administration at a very critical period in our parliamentary history. Mr. Pitt was stricken with the malady which proved fatal—a typhus fever, caught from some accidental infection, when his system was reduced by the stomach complaints he long laboured under. He soon appointed a time when his friend might come to see him. This, their last interview, was in the villa on Putney Heath, where he died a few days after. Lord Wellesley called upon me there many years after: it was then occupied by my brother-in-law, Mr. Eden, whom I was visiting. His lordship showed me the place where those illustrious friends sat. Mr. Pitt was, he said, much emaciated and enfeebled, but retained his gaiety and his constitutionally sanguine disposition; he expressed his confident hopes of recovery. In the adjoining room he lay a corpse the ensuing week; and it is a singular and melancholy circumstance, resembling the stories told of William the Conqueror’s deserted state at his decease, that, some one in the neighbourhood having sent a message to inquire after Mr. Pitt’s state, he found the wicket open, then the door of the house, and, nobody answering the bell, he walked through the rooms till he reached the bed on which the minister’s body lay lifeless, the sole tenant of the mansion of which the doors, a few hours before, were darkened by crowds of suitors alike obsequious and importunate, the vultures whose instinct haunts the carcases only of living ministers.”—Lord Brougham’s Historical Sketches.
[20] Lord Malmesbury cites Lady M.’s account of Mr. Pitt’s last words as follows:—“Lady M. who saw Sir Walter Farquhar three days after Pitt’s death, and received from him an account of his last hours, said that almost the last words he spoke intelligibly were these to himself, and more than once repeated, ‘Oh! what times! oh, my country!’”
[21] Here must be some mistake in my notes; for Lady Cobham’s might have been a family picture, if the term were applied to Lord Chatham’s residence; but how could it be so, as belonging to the Wiltshire estate? However, I let it stand as it was written at the time.
[22] Much has been written in prose and verse on the advantages and mischief of smoking tobacco. Tissot, among others, filled a volume to prove that half the maladies of mankind may be traced to the use of tobacco. But when some millions of people, male and female, as in Turkey, smoke from morning till night, and live, florid and robust, to a good old age, it may be questioned whether Tissot showed the same sagacity in his nosological researches on this as on other subjects. All I can say is that Lady Hester gave her sanction to the practice by the habitual use of the long oriental pipe, which use dated from the year 1817, or thereabouts.
As she had now kept her bed for many weeks, we will describe her there, when, lying with her pipe in her mouth, talking on politics, philosophy, morality, religion, or on any other theme, with her accustomed eloquence, and closing her periods with a whiff that would have made the Duchess of Rutland stare with astonishment, could she have risen from her tomb to have seen her quondam friend, the brilliant ornament of a London drawing-room, clouded in fumes so that her features were sometimes invisible. Now, this altered individual had not a covering to her bed that was not burnt into twenty holes by the sparks and ashes that had fallen from her pipe; and, had not these coverings been all woollen, it is certain that, on some unlucky night, she must have been consumed, bed and all.