'Being now in his seventy-seventh year, very little more can be hoped for by himself or expected by others.
'Having been long accustomed to the confinement of his study, retirement and old age incessantly call upon him with the less terrour; and resignation to his increasing infirmities becomes every day easier and less irksome, till at last he now accounts it among the blessings of long life that it has quieted and extinguished every spark of ambition, and that it enables him to withdraw more and more with some decency from the world; precluding the perhaps well-intended, though rather too frequent visits of civility, in which there is generally more dissipation at all stages of life than real compensation for the waste of time, especially in the days of age.
'In hopes, however, of being not entirely useless as yet, whilst it pleases God to grant him life, most of his present time (as not the least of his pleasures) he allots to the instruction of a dutiful and apprehensive youth, the present companion of his retirement.'
So lived, and so, on the 31st August, 1772, peacefully died, at Ludgvan, Cornwall's 'Nourice of Antiquity,' Dr. William Borlase. He was buried by the side of his wife, near the east end of his own church, on the north side of the altar; and his executor inscribed on his unpretending monument the words:
'Perurbani, perhumani, perquam pii,
hujusce parochiæ per annos LII.
rectoris desideratissimi,
in republica necnon literaria versatissimi.
Loquuntur scripta,
testantur posteri.'
He had six sons, only two of whom survived him, the Rev. John Borlase and the Rev. George Borlase, Casuistical Professor and Registrar of the University of Cambridge. His son Christopher, a sailor, died of a fever on the coast of Guinea in 1749, and appears to have inherited some of his father's artistic skill.
As an illustration of Borlase's 'method,' and of his perfervid imagination when he got amongst his native granite rocks, I have thought it would be interesting to cull the following few notes from his 'Scilly Isles':
'On a Carn adjoining the Giant's Castle,' he observes, 'the floor, consisting only of one Rock, must convince us that this Circle was intended for a place of Worship, for it could not serve for a Sepulchre; but why the Quoits were hollowed out into Basons (as they are placed in a Religious Circle) must have been in some sort or other subservient to the purposes of the Druid Superstition.' As regards the 'Rock Basons,' he goes on to say, 'My opinion concerning the use of them you do not want to be informed of; I have always thought that they were designed to receive in their utmost purity the waters of the Heavens for holy uses; but in such doubtful cases let every man think for himself.' A little further on, however, the worthy Doctor's theory as to the extreme purity of the water is somewhat disturbed by his finding some of them inconveniently near the sea; but he is equal to the occasion. 'Though,' he says, 'the spray of the sea so near them on every hand might well be supposed to fill these Basons with salt water, yet I found the water in them to be quite fresh.' Some of these were actually under the sea-level!
In another place, writing of tolmens, the Doctor observes that, though their Cornish name, appropriately enough, signifies a holed stone, yet that was not 'the true Druid name ... for the Druids probably call'd it by the name of one of their Deities as soon as it was ritually consecrated, and most likely by that of Saturn.'