If you had, sir, I should not have snatched so eagerly at your bait.
I suppose you attended Thomson in a medical as well as in a social capacity?
Yes, Armstrong and myself were with him till his last moments. I was in the room with him when he died. A putrid fever carried him off in less than a week. He seemed to me to be desirous not to live, and I had reason to think that my sister-in-law was the occasion of this. He could not bear the thoughts of her being married to another.
Pray did you attend his funeral?
Indeed I did, and a real funeral it was to me, as Quin said when he spoke the prologue to “Coriolanus”—“I was in truth no actor there.”
Did you hear Quin speak that prologue, sir?
Yes, I could not have been absent.
Were you the only intimate friend who paid the last tribute of respect to Thomson’s remains?
No, sir, Quin attended, and Mallet, and another friend, whose name I do not recollect. He was interred in the north-west corner of Richmond church, just where the christening pew now stands. I pointed out the place to the sexton’s widow, that she might show it to strangers.