I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone to visit
a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor N.R. has lain
dying now for almost a week; such is the penalty we pay for having
enjoyed through life a strong constitution. Whether he knew me or not,
I know not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the
group I saw about him I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it,
were assembled his Wife, their two Daughters, and poor deaf Robert,
looking doubly stupified. There they were, and seemed to have been
sitting all the week. I could only reach out a hand to Mrs. R.
Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time it must be
all over with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He
was my friend, and my father's friend, for all the life that I can
remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships since. Those are the
friendships, which outlast a second generation. Old as I am getting,
in his eyes I was still the child he knew me. To the last he called
me Jemmy. I have none to call me Jemmy now. He was the last link that
bound me to B----. You are but of yesterday. In him I seem to have
lost the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart. Lettered
he was not; his reading scarcely exceeded the Obituary of the old
Gentleman's Magazine, to which he has never failed of having recourse
for these last fifty years. Yet there was the pride of literature
about him from that slender perusal; and moreover from his office of
archive-keeper to your ancient city, in which he must needs pick up
some equivocal Latin; which, among his less literary friends, assumed
the air of a very pleasant pedantry. Can I forget the erudite look
with which, having tried to puzzle out the text of a Black lettered
Chaucer in your Corporation Library, to which he was a sort of
Librarian, he gave it up with this consolatory reflection--"Jemmy,"
said he, "I do not know what you find in these very old books, but I
observe, there is a deal of very indifferent spelling in them." His
jokes (for he had some) are ended; but they were old Perennials,
staple, and always as good as new. He had one Song, that spake of the
"flat bottoms of our foes coming over in darkness," and alluded to a
threatened Invasion, many years since blown over; this he reserved to
be sung on Christmas Night, which we always passed with him, and he
sung it with the freshness of an impending event. How his eyes would
sparkle when he came to the passage:
We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat,
In spite of the devil and Brussels' Gazette!
What is the Brussels' Gazette now? I cry, while I endite these
trifles. His poor girls who are, I believe, compact of solid goodness,
will have to receive their afflicted mother at an unsuccessful home
in a petty village in ----shire, where for years they have been
struggling to raise a Girls' School with no effect. Poor deaf Robert
(and the less hopeful for being so) is thrown upon a deaf world,
without the comfort to his father on his death-bed of knowing him
provided for. They are left almost provisionless. Some life assurance
there is; but, I fear, not exceeding ----. Their hopes must be from
your Corporation, which their father has served for fifty years. Who
or what are your Leading Members now, I know not. Is there any, to
whom without impertinence, you can represent the true circumstances of
the family? You cannot say good enough of poor R., and his poor wife.
Oblige me and the dead, if you can.