Читать книгу The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook - Theodore Edward Hook - Страница 5

At the age of 51 from a Portrait by Count D'Orsay

"On hearing this, I strongly pressed on him the necessity of having further advice, which he at length promised he would do, if he were not better in a day or two. I told him that my wife and myself were going down to the Isle of Thanet, and pressed him very much to throw work overboard for a while, and accompany us and be nursed. He said, however, 'he was completely tied to his desk till he had concluded what he was then writing for Colburn and Bentley; but that he should get quite clear of his trammels in about a month, and then, if we were still there, he would make an effort to pay us a visit.'"

In truth, he was soon past writing; death was advancing upon him with rapid strides, while earthly prospects were growing, daily, darker and more threatening. It is painful to reflect that his last hours, ere the struggling mind had sunk into insensibility, were disturbed by the apprehension of inability to meet a couple of bills of comparatively trifling amount, on the point, as he believed, of becoming due. On Friday, the 13th of August, he took finally to his bed, the stream hurried on with increasing velocity as it approached the fall—a brief agitated interval, happily not neglected, was left for the first, last work of erring man, and on the evening of the 24th he expired.

The disorder under which he had been labouring for years, arose from a diseased state of the liver and stomach, brought on partly by mental anxiety, but principally, it is to be feared, by that habit of over-indulgence at table, the curse of Colonial life, which he had early acquired, and to which he held with fatal perseverance to the end. It needed no ordinary powers to enable him to sustain the contest so long; but his frame was robust and his constitution vigorous; and he seems to have possessed in a remarkable degree that power of maintaining the supremacy of mind over matter, which rendered him indifferent to, or unconscious of, the first slow approaches of decay. He was buried with extreme privacy at Fulham; a simple stone bearing his name and age marks the spot, which is immediately opposite the chancel window, and within a few paces of his former home.