"
At last the end came. While a young man, he had suffered from a painful
attack of vertigo, brought on by a surfeit of fruit; "eating," he says, in
a letter to Mrs. Howard, "an hundred golden pippins at a time." This had
occasioned a deafness; and both giddiness and deafness had recurred at
intervals, and at last manifestly affected his mind. Once, when walking
with some friends, he had pointed to an elm-tree, blasted by lightning,
and had said, "I shall be like that tree: I shall die first at the top."
And thus at last the doom fell. Struck on the brain, he lingered for nine
years in that valley of spectral horrors, of whose only gates idiocy and
madness are the hideous wardens. From this bondage he was released by
death on the 19th of October, 1745.
Many have called it a fearful retribution for his sins, and especially for
his treatment of Stella and Vanessa. A far more reasonable and charitable
verdict is that the evil in his conduct through life had its origin in
congenital disorder; and in his days of apparent sanity, the character of
his eccentric actions is to be palliated, if not entirely excused, on the
plea of insanity.
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