From “Literary and Historical Miscellanies.”

PERHAPS the most common device for averting contemplation from death itself is in directing it to the manner of dying. Vanitas vanitatum! Vanity does not give up its hold on the last hour. Men wish to die with distinction, to be buried in state; and the last thoughts are employed on the decorum of the moment, or in the anticipation of funeral splendors. It was no uncommon thing among the Romans for a rich man to appoint an heir, on condition that his obsequies should be celebrated with costly pomp. “When I am dead,” said an Indian chief, who fell into his last sleep at Washington,—“when I am dead, let the big guns be fired over me.” The words were thought worthy of being engraved on his tomb; but they are no more than a plain expression of a very common passion,—the same, which leads the humblest to desire that at least a stone may be placed at the head of his grave, and demands the erection of splendid mausoleums and costly tombs for the mistaken men,

  Among the Ancients, an opulent man, while yet in health, would order his own sarcophagus; and nowadays the wealthy sometimes build their own tombs, for the sake of securing a satisfactory monument. A vain man, who had done this at a great expense, showed his motive so plainly, that his neighbors laughed with the sexton of the parish, who wished that the builder might not be kept long out of the interest of his money.

  But it is not merely in the decorations of the grave that vanity is displayed. Saladin, in his last illness, instead of his usual standard, ordered his shroud to be uplifted in front of his tent; and the herald, who hung out this winding sheet as a flag, was commanded to exclaim aloud: “Behold! this is all which Saladin, the vanquisher of the East, carries away of all his conquests.” He was wrong there. He came naked into the world, and he left it naked. Graveclothes were a superfluous luxury, and, to the person receiving them, as barren of comfort as his sceptre or his scimiter. Saladin was vain. He sought in dying to contrast the power he had enjoyed with the feebleness of his condition; to pass from the world in a striking antithesis; to make his death scene an epigram. All was vanity.

  A century ago it was the fashion for culprits to appear on the scaffold in the dress of dandies. Some centuries before, it was the privilege of noblemen, if they merited hanging, to escape the gallows, and perish on the block. The Syrian priests had foretold to the Emperor Heliogabulus that he would be reduced to the necessity of committing suicide; believing them true prophets, he kept in readiness silken cords and a sword of gold. Admirable privilege of the nobility, to be beheaded instead of hanged! Enviable prerogative of imperial dignity, to be strangled with a knot of silk, or to be assassinated with a golden sword!

  The example chosen by the poet extended to appearances after death; for the presence of the same weakness in the hour of mortality we must look to the precincts of courts, where folly used to reign by prescriptive right; where caprice gives law and pleasures consume life. There you may witness the harlot’s euthanasia. The French court was at Choisy when Madame de Pompadour felt the pangs of a fatal malady. It had been the established etiquette that none but princes and persons of royal blood should breathe their last in Versailles. Proclaim to the gay circles of Paris that a thing new and unheard of is to be permitted; announce to the world that the rules of palace propriety and Bourbon decorum are to be broken! That the chambers, where vice had fearlessly lived and laughed, but had never been permitted to expire, were to admit the novel spectacle of the king’s favorite mistress struggling with death!

  The marchioness questioned the physicians firmly; she perceived their hesitation; she saw the hand that beckoned her away; and she determined, says the historian, to depart in the pomp of a queen. Louis XV., himself not capable of a strong emotion, was yet willing to concede to his dying friend the consolation which she coveted,—the opportunity to reign till her parting gasp. The courtiers thronged round the deathbed of a woman who distributed favors with the last exhalations of her breath; and the king hurried to name to public offices the persons whom her faltering accents recommended. Her sick room became a scene of state; the princes and grandees still entered to pay their homage to the woman whose power did not yield to mortal disease, and were surprised to find her richly attired. The traces of death in her countenance were concealed by rouge. She reclined on a splendid couch; questions of public policy were discussed by ministers in her presence; she gloried in holding to the end the reins of the kingdom in her hands. Even a sycophant clergy showed respect to the expiring favorite, and felt no shame as sanctioning with their frequent visits the vices of a woman who had entered the palace only as an adulteress. Having complied with the rites of the Roman Church, she next sought the approbation of the philosophers. She lisped no word of penitence; she shed no tears of regret. The curate left her as she was in the agony. “Wait a moment,” said she, “we will leave the house together.”

  The dying mistress was worshiped while she breathed. Hardly was she dead when the scene changed; two domestics carried out her body on a handbarrow from the palace to her private home. The king stood at the window, looking at the clouds, as her remains were carried by. “The marchioness,” said he, “will have bad weather on her journey.”

  The flickering lamp blazes with unusual brightness just as it goes out. “The fit gives vigor as it destroys.” He who has but a moment remaining is released from the common motives for dissimulation; and Time, that lays his hand on everything else, destroying beauty, undermining health, and wasting the powers of life, spares the ruling passion, which is connected with the soul itself. That passion

  Napoleon expired during the raging of a whirlwind, and his last words showed that his thoughts were in the battlefield. The meritorious author of the “Memoir of Cabot,” a work which in accuracy and in extensive research is very far superior to most late treatises on maritime discovery, tells us that the discoverer of our continent, in a hallucination before his death, believed himself again on the ocean, once more steering in quest of adventure over waves which knew him as the steed knows its rider. How many a gentle eye has been dimmed with tears as it read the fabled fate of Fergus MacIvor! Not inferior to the admirable hero of the romance was the Marquis of Montrose, who had fought for the Stuarts and fell into the hands of the Presbyterians. His head and his limbs were ordered to be severed from his body and to be hanged on the tollbooth in Edinburgh and in other public towns of the kingdom. He listened to the sentence with the pride of loyalty and the fierce anger of a generous defiance. “I wish,” he exclaimed, “I had flesh enough to be sent to every city in Christendom, as a testimony to the cause for which I suffer.”

  But let us take an example of sublimer virtue, such as we find in a statesman who lived without a stain from youth to maturity, and displayed an unwavering consistency to the last; a hero in civil life, who was in some degree our own. It becomes America to take part in rescuing from undeserved censure the names and the memory of victims to the unconquerable love of republican liberty.

  He that would discern the difference between magnanimous genius and a shallow wit may compare this splendid eulogy of Milton with the superficial levity in the commentary of Warton. It is a fashion to call Sir Henry Vane a fanatic. And what is fanaticism? True, he was a rigid Calvinist. True, he has written an obscure book on the mystery of godliness, of which all that we understand is excellent, and we may, therefore, infer that the vein of the rest is good. But does this prove him a fanatic? If to be the uncompromising defender of civil and religious liberty be fanaticism; if to forgive injuries be fanaticism; if to believe that the mercy of God extends to all his creatures, and may reach even the angels of darkness, be fanaticism, if to have earnestly supported in the Long Parliament the freedom of conscience; if to have repeatedly, boldly, and zealously interposed to check the persecution of Roman Catholics; if to have labored that the sect which he least approved should enjoy their property in security and be safe from all penal enactments for nonconformity; if in his public life to have pursued a career of firm, conscientious, disinterested consistency, never wavering, never trimming, never changing,—if all this be fanaticism, then was Sir Henry Vane a fanatic. Not otherwise. The people of Massachusetts declined to continue him in office; and when his power in England was great, he requited the colony with the benefits of his favoring influence. He resisted the arbitrariness of Charles I., but would not sit as one of his judges. He opposed the tyranny of Cromwell. When that extraordinary man entered the House of Commons to break up the Parliament, which was about to pass laws that would have endangered his supremacy, Vane rebuked him for his purpose of treason. When the musketeers invaded the Hall of Debate, and others were silent, Vane exclaimed to the most despotic man in Europe: “This is not honest. It is against morality and common honesty.” Well might Cromwell, since his designs were criminal, reply: “Sir Henry Vane! Sir Henry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!”

  Though Vane suffered from the usurpation of the Protector, he lived to see the Restoration. On the return of the Stuarts, like Lafayette among the Bourbons, he remained the stanch enemy of tyranny. The austere patriot, whom Cromwell had feared, struck terror into the hearts of a faithless and licentious court. It was resolved to destroy him. In a different age or country, the poisoned cup, or the knife of the assassin, might have been used; in that season of corrupt influence, a judicial murder was resolved upon. His death was a deliberate crime, contrary to the royal promise; contrary to the express vote of “the healing Parliament”; contrary to law, to equity, to the evidence. But it suited the designs of a monarch, who feared to be watched by a statesman of incorruptible elevation of character. The night before his execution he enjoyed the society of his family, as if he had been reposing in his own mansion. The next morning he was beheaded. The least concession would have saved him. If he had only consented to deny the supremacy of Parliament, the king would have restrained the malignity of his hatred. “Ten thousand deaths for me,” exclaimed Vane, “ere I will stain the purity of my conscience.” Historians report that life was dear to him; he submitted to his end with the firmness of a patriot, the serenity of a Christian….

  Lorenzo de Medici, upon his deathbed, sent for Savonarola to receive his confession and grant him absolution. The severe anchorite questioned the dying sinner with unsparing rigor. “Do you believe entirely in the mercy of God?” “Yes, I feel it in my heart.” “Are you truly ready to restore all the possessions and estates which you have unjustly acquired?” The dying duke hesitated; he counted up in his mind the sums which he had hoarded; delusion whispered that nearly all had been so honestly gained that the sternest censor would strike but little from his opulence. The pains of hell were threatened if he denied; and he gathered courage to reply that he was ready to make restitution. Once more the unyielding priest resumed his inquisition. “Will you resign the sovereignty of Florence, and restore the democracy of the republic?” Lorenzo, like Macbeth, had acquired a crown; but, unlike Macbeth, he saw sons of his own about to become his successors. He gloried in the hope of being the father of princes, the founder of a line of hereditary sovereigns. Should he crush this brilliant expectation and tremble at the wild words of a visionary? Should he who had reigned as a monarch stoop to die as a merchant? No! though hell itself were opening beneath his bed. “Not that! I cannot part with that!” Savonarola left his bedside with indignation, and Lorenzo died without shrift.

  Like this was the exclamation of the patriot Quincy, whose virtues have been fitly commemorated by the pious reverence of his son. The celebrated Admiral Blake breathed his last as he came in sight of England, happy in at last descrying the land, of which he had advanced the glory by his brilliant victories. Quincy died as he approached the coast of Massachusetts. He loved his family; but at that moment he gave his whole soul to the cause of freedom. “Oh, that I might live,”—it was his dying wish,—“to render my country one last service.”

  The coward falls panic-stricken; the superstitious man dies with visions of terror floating before his fancy. It has even happened that a man has been in such dread of eternal woe as to cut his throat in his despair. The phenomenon seems strange, but the fact is unquestionable. The giddy that are near a precipice totter towards the brink which they would shun. Everybody remembers the atheism and bald sensuality of the septuagenarian Alexander VI.; and the name of his natural son, Cæsar Borgia, is a proverb as a synonym for the most vicious selfishness. Let one tale, of which Macchiavelli attests the truth, set forth the deep baseness of a cowardly nature. Borgia had, by the most solemn oaths, induced the Duke of Gravina, Oliverotto, Vitellozzo Vitelli, and another, to meet him in Senigaglia, for the purpose of forming a treaty, and then issued the order for the massacre of Oliverotto and Vitelli. Can it be believed? Vitelli, as he expired, begged of the infamous Borgia, his assassin, to obtain of Alexander a dispensation for his omissions, a release from purgatory.

  The deathbed of Cromwell himself was not free from superstition. When near his end he asked if the elect could never fall. “Never,” replied Godwin the preacher. “Then I am safe,” said the man whose last years had been stained by cruelty and tyranny; “for I am sure I was once in a state of grace.”

  Ximenes languished from disappointment at the loss of power and the want of royal favor. A smile from Louis would have cheered the deathbed of Racine.

  In a brave mind the love of honor endures to the last. “Don’t give up the ship,” cried Lawrence, as his lifeblood was flowing in torrents. Abimelech groaned that he fell ignobly by the hand of a woman. We have ever admired the gallant death of Sir Richard Grenville, who, in a single ship, encountered a numerous fleet, and, when mortally wounded, husbanded his strength till he could summon his victors to bear testimony to his courage and his patriotism. “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyous and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, fighting for his country, queen, religion, and honor.”

  The public has been instructed through the press in the details of the treason of Benedict Arnold by an inquirer, who has compassed earth and sea in search of historic truth, and has merited the applause of his country not less for candor and judgment than for diligence and ability. The victim of the intrigue was André. The mind of the young soldier revolted at the service of treachery in which he had become involved, and, holding a stain upon honor to be worse than the forfeiture of life, he shuddered at the sight of the gallows, but not at the thought of dying. He felt the same sentiment which made death welcome to Nelson and to Wolfe, to whom it came with glory and victory for its companions; but for André, the keen sense of honor added bitterness to the cup of affliction, by exciting fear lest the world should take the manner of his execution as evidence of merited opprobrium.

  Finally, he who has a good conscience and a well-balanced mind meets death with calmness, resignation, and hope. Saint Louis died among the ruins of Carthage; a Christian king, laboring in vain to expel the religion of Mahomet from the spot where Dido had planted the gods of Syria. “My friends,” said he, “I have finished my course. Do not mourn for me. It is natural that I, as your chief and leader, should go before you. You must follow me. Keep yourselves in readiness for the journey.” Then giving his son his blessing and the best advice, he received the Sacrament, closed his eyes, and died as he was repeating from the Psalms: “I will come into thy house; I will worship in thy holy temple.”

  The curate of St. Sulpice asked the confessor who had shrived Montesquieu on his deathbed, if the penitent had given satisfaction. “Yes,” replied Father Roust, “like a man of genius.” The curate was displeased. Unwilling to leave the dying man a moment of tranquillity, he addressed him, “Sir, are you truly conscious of the greatness of God?” “Yes,” said the departing philosopher, “and of the littleness of man.”

  How calm were the last moments of Cuvier! Benevolence of feeling and self-possession diffused serenity round the hour of his passing away. Confident that the hand of Death was upon him, he yet submitted to the application of remedies, that he might gratify his more hopeful friends. They had recourse to leeches; and with delightful simplicity the great naturalist observed, it was he who had discovered that leeches possess red blood. The discovery, which he made in his youth, had been communicated to the public in the memoir that first gained him celebrity. The thoughts of the dying naturalist recurred to the scenes of his early life, to the coast of Normandy, where, in the solitude of conscious genius, he had roamed by the side of the ocean, and achieved fame by observing the wonders of animal life which are nourished in its depths. He remembered his years of poverty, the sullen rejection which his first claims for advancement had received, and all the vicissitudes through which he had been led to the highest distinctions in science. The son of the Würtemberg soldier, of too feeble a frame to embrace the profession of his father, had found his way to the secrets of nature. The man who in his own province had been refused the means of becoming the village pastor of an ignorant peasantry, had succeeded in charming the most polished circles of Paris by the clearness of his descriptions, and commanding the attention of the Deputies of France by the grace and fluency of his elocution. And now he was calmly predicting his departure; his respiration became rapid; and his head fell as if he were in meditation. Thus his soul passed to its Creator without a struggle. “Those who entered afterwards would have thought that the noble old man, seated in his armchair by the fireplace, was asleep, and would have walked softly across the room for fear of disturbing him.” Heaven had but “recalled its own.”

  The death of Haller himself was equally tranquil. When its hour approached, he watched the ebbing of life and continued to observe the beating of his pulse till sensation was gone.

  A tranquil death becomes the man of science or the scholar. He should cultivate letters to the last moment of his life; he should resign public honors as calmly as one would take off a domino on returning from a mask. He should listen to the signal for his departure, not with exultation, and not with indifference. Respecting the dread solemnity of the change, and reposing in hope on the bosom of Death, he should pass, without boldness and without fear, from the struggles of inquiry to the certainty of knowledge, from a world of doubt to a world of truth.