Here, at this pathetic line, was André Chenier summoned to the
guillotine! Never was a more beautiful effusion of grief interrupted by
a more affecting incident!
Several men of science have died in a scientific manner. Haller, the
poet, philosopher, and physician, beheld his end approach with the
utmost composure. He kept feeling his pulse to the last moment, and when
he found that life was almost gone, he turned to his brother physician,
observing, "My friend, the artery ceases to beat," and almost instantly
expired. The same remarkable circumstance had occurred to the great
Harvey: he kept making observations on the state of his pulse, when life
was drawing to its close, "as if," says Dr. Wilson, in the oration
spoken a few days after the event, "that he who had taught us the
beginning of life might himself, at his departing from it, become
acquainted with those of death."
De Lagny, who was intended by his friends for the study of the law,
having fallen on an Euclid, found it so congenial to his dispositions,
that he devoted himself to mathematics. In his last moments, when he
retained no further recollection of the friends who surrounded his bed,
one of them, perhaps to make a philosophical experiment, thought proper
to ask him the square of twelve: our dying mathematician instantly, and
perhaps without knowing that he answered, replied, "One hundred and
forty-four."
The following anecdotes are of a different complexion, and may excite a
smile.
Père Bohours was a French grammarian, who had been justly accused of
paying too scrupulous an attention to the minutiæ of letters. He was
more solicitous of his _words_ than his _thoughts_. It is said, that
when he was dying, he called out to his friends (a correct grammarian to
the last), "_Je_ VAS _ou je_ VAIS _mourir; l'un ou l'autre se dit_!"
When Malherbe was dying, he reprimanded his nurse for making use of a
solecism in her language; and when his confessor represented to him the
felicities of a future state in low and trite expressions, the dying
critic interrupted him:--"Hold your tongue," he said; "your wretched
style only makes me out of conceit with them!"
The favourite studies and amusements of the learned La Mothe le Vayer
consisted in accounts of the most distant countries. He gave a striking
proof of the influence of this master-passion, when death hung upon his
lips. Bernier, the celebrated traveller, entering and drawing the
curtains of his bed to take his eternal farewell, the dying man turning
to him, with a faint voice inquired, "Well, my friend, what news from
the Great Mogul?"