selves are sometimes erased. Fontenelle Next the body relapses into helplessness, the mind into vacancy and this is the second childhood of man-an expression upon which some physiologists have built fanciful analogies, as if infancy and age, like the rising and setting sun, were the same unaltered object in opposite parts of the horizon. But there is little more resemblance than in the vegetable world between immaturity and rottenness. Sir Walter Scott, when growing Rarely is there seen a case of death from pure old age. In those who live longest, some disease is usually developed which lays the axe to the root of the tree; but occasionally the body wears itself out, and, without a malady or a pain, sinks by a slow and unperceived decay. All the aged approximate to the condition, and show the nature of the process. The organs have less life, the functions less vigor; the sight grows dim, the hearing dull, the touch obtuse; the limbs lose their suppleness, the motions their freedom, and, without local disorder or general disturbance, it is everywhere plain that vitality is receding. The old are often indolent from natural disposition; they are slow in their movements by a physical necessity. With the strength enfeebled, the bones brit-infirmities made him speak of himself playtle, the ligaments rigid, the muscles weak, fully as coming round to the starting-point of feats of activity are no longer possible. The the circle, said he wished he could cut a new limbs which bent in youth would break in set of teeth. The remark touched the disage. Bentley used to say he was like his tinction between the morning and evening of battered trunk, which held together if left to life. Age and infancy are both toothless, itself, and would fall to pieces with the jolts but the teeth of the former are coming, the and rough usage of better days. Lord teeth of the latter are gone the one is Chesterfield, in his decrepitude, was unable awakening to a world upon which the other to support the rapid motion of a carriage; is closing its eyes. The two portraits are in and when about to take an airing, said, in perfect contrast. Here activity, there torallusion to the foot's pace at which he crept por - here curiosity, there listlessness along, "I am now going to the rehearsal of here the prattle of dawning intelligence, my funeral." The expression was one of there the babbling of expiring dotage. Demany which showed that his mind had not crepitude which has sunk into imbecility participated in the decay of his body; but must be endeared by past recollections to be even with men less remarkable it is common loved. But to despise it is an insult to hufor the intellect to remain unbroken amidst man nature, and to pity it on its own acsurrounding infirmity. The memory alone count, wasted sympathy. Paley rightly asseldom escapes. Events long gone by retain serted that happiness was with dozing old their hold-passing incidents excite a feeble age in its easy chair, as well as with youth interest, and are instantly forgotten. The in the pride and exuberance of life, and if its brain, like a mould that has set, keeps the feelings are less buoyant they are more plaold impressions, and can take no new ones. cid. To die piecemeal carries with it a Living rather in the past than the present, frightful sound, until we learn by observathe aged naturally love to reproduce it, and tion that of all destroyers time is the gengrow more narrative than is always enter- tlest. The organs degenerate without pain, taining to younger ears; yet, without the and dwindling together, a perfect harmony is smallest sense of weariness, they can sit for kept up in the system. Digestion languishes, hours silent and unemployed, for feebleness the blood diminishes, the heart beats slower, renders repose delightful, and they need no and by imperceptible gradations they reach other allurement in existence than to feel at last their lowest term. Drowsiness inthat they exist. Past recollections them- creases with the decline of the powers more. life passes into sleep, sleep into death. De Moivre, the master of calculation, spent, at eighty, twenty hours of the twenty-four in slumber, until he fell asleep and woke no His was a natural death unaccompanied by disease, and, though this is uncommon, yet disease itself lays a softer hand upon the aged than the young, as a tottering ruin is easier overthrown than a tower in its strength. The first symptom of approaching death with some is the strong presentiment that they are about to die. Özanam, the mathematician, while in apparent health, rejected pupils from the feeling that he was on the eve of resting from his labors, and he expired soon after of an apoplectic stroke. Flechier, the divine, had a dream which shadowed out his impending dissolution, and believing it to be the merciful warning of heaven, he sent for a sculptor and ordered his tomb. Begin your work forthwith," he said at parting; "there is no time to lose" and unless the artist had obeyed the admonition, death would have proved the quicker workman of the two. Mozart wrote his Requiem under the conviction that the monument he was raising to his genius would, by the power of association, prove a universal monument to his own remains. When life was flitting fast, he called for the score, and, musing over it, said, "Did I not tell you truly that it was for myself I composed this death-chant?" Another great artist, in a different department, convinced that his hand was about to lose its cunning, chose a subject emblematical of the coming event. His friends inquired the nature of his next design, and Hogarth replied, "The end of all things." "In that case," rejoined one of the number, "there will be an end of the painter." What was uttered in jest he answered in earnest, with a solemn look and a heavy sigh: "There will," he said "and therefore the sooner my work is done the better." He commenced next day, labored upon it with unintermitting diligence, and when he had given it the last touch, seized his palette, broke it in pieces, and said "I have finished." The print was published in March under the title of "Finis," and in October," the curious eyes which saw the manners in the face" were closed in dust. Our ancestors, who were prone to look into the air for causes which were to be found upon earth, ascribed these intimations to supernatural agency. It was conjectured that the guardian genius, who was supposed to attend upon man, infused into his mind a friendly though gloomy foreboding, or more distinctly prefigured to him his end by a vision of the night. John Hunter has solved the mystery, if mystery it can be called, in a single sentence: "We sometimes," he says, feel within ourselves that we shall not live, for the living powers become weak, and the nerves communicate the intelligence to the brain." His own case has often been quoted among the marvels of which he afforded the rational explanation. He intimated on leaving home that if a discussion, which awaited him at the Hospital, took an angry turn, it would prove his death. A colleague gave him the lie; the coarse word verified the prophecy, and he expired almost immediately in an adjoining room. There was everything to lament in the circumstance, but nothing at which to wonder, except that any individual could show such disrespect to the great genius, a single year of whose existence was worth the united lives of his opponents. Hunter, in uttering the prediction, had only to take counsel of his own experience without the intervention of invisible spirits. He had long labored under a disease of the heart, and he felt the disorder had reached the point at which any sharp agitation would bring on the crisis. A memorable instance of the weakness which accompanies the greatness of man, when an abusive appellation could extinguish one of the brightest lights that ever illumined science. No discoverer has left more varied titles to fame, and none has given more abundant evidence that he would have added to the number the longer he lived, for his mind teemed with original ideas, and fast as one crop was cleared away another sprang up. Circumstances which at another time would excite no attention are accepted for an omen when health is failing. The order for the Requiem with Mozart, the dream with Flechier, turned the current of their thoughts to the grave. The death of a contemporary, which raises no fears in the young and vigorous, is often regarded by the old and feeble as a summons to themselves. Foote, prior to his departure for the Continent, stood contemplating the portrait of a brother-actor, and exclaimed, his eyes full of tears, "Poor Weston !" In the same dejected tone he added, after a pause, "Soon others shall say, Poor Foote !"—and, to the surprise of his friends, a few days proved the justice of the prognostication. The expectation of the event has a share in producing it, for a slight shock their heartless scheme they whispered to each other, "She is just departing," she departed in earnest. Her vigor, instead of detecting the trick, sank beneath the alarm, and the profane pair discovered in the midst of their sport that they were making merry with a corpse. A condemned gentleman was handed over to some French physicians, completes the destruction of prostrate energies. Many an idle belief, in superstitious times, lent a stimulus to disease, and pushed into the grave those who happened to be trembling on its brink. Kings and princes took the shows of the skies for their particular share. Louise of Savoy, the mother of Francis I., when sick of a fever, saw, or fancied she saw, a comet. "Ha!" she ex-who, to try the effects of imagination, told claimed, "there is an omen which appears not for people of low degree: God sends it for us great. Shut the window; it announces my death; I must prepare.' Her physicians assured her she was not in a dying state. Unless," she replied, "I had seen the sign of my death I should have said the same, for I do not myself feel that I am sinking." She sank, however, from that time, and died in three days. Confidence in the physician is proverbially said to be half the cure, because it keeps up hope, and lends to the body the support of the mind; but when despair cooperates with the distemper, they react upon one other, and a curable complaint is easily converted into a mortal disease. The case of Wolsey was more singular. The morning before he died he asked Cavendish the hour, and was answered past eight. "Eight of the clock," replied Wolsey, "that cannot be,-eight of the clock, eight of the clock,-nay, nay, it cannot be eight of the clock, for by eight of the clock shall you lose your master.' The day he miscalculated,-the hour came true. On the following morning, as the clock struck eight his troubled spirit passed from life. Cavendish and the bystanders thought he must have had a revelation of the time of his death, and, from the way in which the fact had taken possession of his mind, we suspect that he relied upon some astrological prediction which had the credit of a revelation in his own esteem. him that it was intended to despatch him by bleeding-the easiest method known to their art. Covering his face with a cloth, they pinched him to counterfeit the prick of the lancet, placed his feet in a bath, as if to encourage the stream, and conversed together on the tragic symptoms supposed to arise. Without the loss of a drop of blood, his spirit died within him from the mental impression, and when the veil was raised he had ceased to live. Montaigne tells of a man who was pardoned upon the scaffold, and was found to have expired while awaiting the stroke. Cardinal Richelieu, in the hope to extract a confession from the Chevalier de Jars, had him brought to the block, and though he comported himself with extraordinary courage and cheerfulness, yet when, an instant or two after he had laid down his head, his pardon was announced to him, he was in a state of stupefaction which lasted several minutes. In spite of his apparent indifference to death, there was an anxiety, in the pause when he was momentarily expecting the axe to descend, which had all but proved fatal. When disease passes into dying, the symptoms usually tell the tale to every eye. The half-closed eyes, turned upward and inward, sink in their sockets; the balls have a faded, filmy look; the temples and cheeks are hollow, the nose is sharp; the lips hang, and, together with the face, are sometimes pale from the failure of the circulation, and sometimes livid from the dark blood which creeps sluggishly through the veins. Start Persons in health have died from the expectation of dying. It was once common for those who perished by violence to sum-ling likenesses to relations, and the self of mon their destroyers to appear within a stated time before the tribunal of God; and we have many perfectly attested instances in which, through the united influence of fear and remorse, the perpetrators withered under the curse and died. Pestilence does not kill with the rapidity of terror. The profligate abbess of a convent, the Princess Gonzaga of Cleves, and Guise, the profligate Archbishop of Rheims, took it into their heads for a jest to visit one of the nuns by night, and exhort her as a person who was visibly dying. While, in the performance of former days, are sometimes revealed when the wasting of the flesh has given prominence to the framework of the face. The cold of Death seizes upon the extremities and continues to spread,- -a sign of common notoriety from time immemorial, which Chaucer has described in verse, Shakspeare in still more picturesque prose. The very breath strikes chill; the skin is clammy; the voice falters and loses its own familiar tones-grows sharp and thin, or faint and murmuring-or comes with an unearthly, muffled sound. The pulse, sometimes pre viously deceitful, breaks down; is first feebler, and then slower; the beats are fitful and broken by pauses; the intervals increase in frequency and duration, and at length it falls to rise no more. The respiration, whether languid or labored, becomes slow at the close; the death-rattle is heard at every expulsion of air; the lungs, like the pulse, become intermittent in their action; a minute or two may elapse between the efforts to breathe, and then one expiration, which has made "to expire" synonymous with "to die," and the conflict with the body is over. As an abstract description of man would fit everybody, although forming a portrait of no one, deaths have their individual peculiarities, in which the differences of detail do not affect the likeness of the outline. Many traits are frequent which are far from usual. Some, when they are sinking, toss the clothes from their chests, and though the attendants, indefatigable in enforcing their own notions of comfort, replace them unceasingly, they are as often thrust back. There must be oppression in the covering or it would not be thrown off, but the patient himself is frequently unconscious, and the act is instinctive, like the casting aside the bed-clothes on a sultry night in the obliviousness of sleep. Others pick at the sheets, or work them between their fingers, which may be done in obedience to an impulse of the nerves, or to excite by friction the sense of touch, which is growing benumbed. We have seen persons among the lower orders burst into tears at witnessing an action which conveyed to their minds a sentence of death. The senses are constantly subject to allusions. The eyes of the dying will conjure up particles which they mistake for realities, and attempt to catch them with their hand, or, if they are looking at the bed, they suppose them specks upon the clothes, and assiduously endeavor to brush them away. The awful shadow cast by death throws a solemnity over every object within range, and gives importance to actions that would otherwise be thought too trivial for notice. Ears, soon to be insensible to sound, are often assailed by imaginary noises, which sometimes assume the form of words. Cowper, who was afterward the thrall of fancied voices, which spoke as his morbid spirit inspired, heard three times, when he hung himself in earlier days, the exclamation, "Tis over!" The old idea that the monitor of man summoned him when his final minute had arrived, may easily have been founded upon actual occurrences, and the agent was its invented to explain an undoubted and mysterious effect. Shakspeare, who possessed the power to press everything into his service, has recorded the superstition in Troilus and Cressida :— "Hark! you are called: some say the Genius so Cries COME! to him that instantly must die!" The workings of the mind, when taken in connection with the physical weakness, are often prominent among the symptoms of dissolution. Many of the ancients held the novissima verba in high esteem. They imagined that the departing imbibed a divine. power from that world to which they were bound, and spoke like gods in proportion as they were ceasing to be men. Though the belief is extinct that the prophet's mantle descends upon the shoulders of the dying, there are some who maintain that as the body wanes the mind often shines with increasing lustre. Baxter called a churchyard the market-place where all things are rated at their true value, and those who are approaching it talk of the world, and its vanities, with a wisdom unknown before. But the idea that the capacity of the understanding itself is enlarged-that it acquires new powers and fresh vigor-is due, we conceive, to the emotion of the listeners. The scene impresses the imagination, and the overwrought feelings of the audience color every word. Disease has more frequently an injurious effect, and the mind is heavy, weakened, or deranged. Of the species of idiotcy which ushers in death, Mrs. Quickly gives a perfect description in her narrative of Falstaff's end-an unrivaled piece of painting, and deeply pathetic in the midst of its humor: "After I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way, for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields." Falstaff, to whom a tavern chair was the throne of human felicity, and whose heart was never open to a rural impression, amusing himself with flowers like a child-Falstaff, the impersonation of intellectual wit, and who kept a sad brow at the jests which moved the mirth of every one besides, regarding his fingers' ends with simpering imbecility-there is an epitome of the melancholy contrasts which are constantly witnessed, and which would be mournful, indeed, if we did not know that the bare grain is not quickened except it die, and that the stage of decay must precede its springing into newness of life. The intellect of Falstaff has degenerated into silliness, but he knows what he says, and comprehends what he sees. When the sensibility to outward impressions is lost or disordered, and the mind is delirious, the dying dream of their habitual occupations, and construct an imaginary present from the past. Dr. Armstrong departed delivering medical precepts; Napoleon fought some battle o'er again, and the last words he muttered were tele d'armée; Lord Tenterden, who passed straight from the judgment-seat to his death-bed, fancied himself still presiding at a trial, and expired with, Gentlemen of the jury, you will now consider of your verdict; Dr. Adam, the author of the "Roman Antiquities," imagined himself in school, distributing praise and censure among his pupils: But it grows dark, he said; the boys may dismiss; and instantly died. The physician, soldier, judge, schoolmaster, each had their thoughts on their several professions, and believed themselves engaged in the business of life when life itself was issuing out through their lips. Whether such words are always an evidence of internal consciousness may admit of a doubt. The mind is capable of pursuing a beaten track without attending to its own operations, and the least impulse will set it going when every other power has fled. De Lagny was asked the square of twelve when he was unable to recognize the friends about his bed, and mechanically answered, one hundred and fortyfour. Repetitions of poetry are frequent in this condition, and there is usually a want of coherence and intonation which appears to indicate a want of intelligence, and leaves the conviction, expressed by Dr. Symonds, that the understanding is passive. But upon many occasions it is perfectly obvious that the language of the lips is suggested by the mental dream. The idea of Dr. Adam, that it was growing dark, evidently arose from the fading away of the vision, as the thick darkness of death covered his mind and clouded his perceptions. The man himself is his own world, and he lives among the phantoms he has created, as he lived among the actual beings of flesh and blood, with the difference, perhaps, that the feelings, like the picture, are faint and shadowy. There is a description of dying delirium which resembles drunkenness. Consciousness remains, but not self-control. The individual nature appears in its nakedness, unrelieved by the modifications which interest imposes. A woman who had combined an insatiable appetite for scandal with the extremest caution in retailing it, fell into this state a few hours before she died. This sluice was opened, and the venom and malice were poured out in a flood. Her tones, which in health were low and mysterious, grew noisy and emphatic-the hints were displaced by the strongest terms the language could afford-and the half-completed sentences, which were formerly left for imagination to fill up, all carried now a tail and a sting. "I verily believe," said her husband afterward, "that she repeated in that single day every word she had heard against any body from the time she was a child." The concentration of the mind upon the single topic, the variety and distinctness of the portraits, the virulence and energy of the abuse, the indifference to the tears of her children-heart-broken that their mother should pass from the world uttering anathemas against all her acquaintances, living and dead-made a strange and fearful exhibition, one more impressive than a thousand sermons, to show the danger of indulging an evil passion. A fatal malady sometimes appears to make a stop-the patient lives and breathes; and his friends, who had considered him as belonging to another world, are overjoyed that he is once more one of themselves. But it is death come under a mask. The lifting up from the grave is followed by a relapse which brings down to it again without return. A son of Dr. Beattie lay sick of a fever, which suddenly left him: the delirium was succeeded by a complete tranquillity, and the father was congratulating himself on the danger being over, when the physicians informed him truly that the end was at hand. Death from hydrophobia is not seldom preceded by similar appearance of recovery. A victim of this disorder, in which every drop of liquid aggravates the convulsions, and the very sound of its trickling is often insupportable, was found by Dr. Latham in the utmost composure, having drunk a large jug of porter at a draught. The nurse greeted the physician with the exclamation, "What a wonderful cure!" but in half an hour the man was dead. Sir Henry Halford had seen four or five cases of inflammation of the brain where the raving was succeeded by a lucid interval— the lucid interval by death. One of these was a gentleman who passed three days in lunatic violence, without an instant's cessation or sleep. He then became rational, settled his affairs, sent messages to his relations, and talked of a sister lately dead, whom he said he should follow immediately, |