CHARLES MERIVALE TO HIS SON CHARLES. ELY, November 29, 1890. We are glad to find that you can give a fairly good account of your case, cheerful and amusing as ever. We are fearfully cold here, and do all we can to keep the house full. .. I shall probably have to shut up during the winter as I did last winter; December 3rd will complete my year's absence from public life, and no great loss to myself or to the public. I satisfy myself with the Times and St. James's, and let the public take care of itself. I find mother is already writing to you and will tell you how she has already ordered Lord Houghton, and I will send it on as soon as we have looked over it, duly inscribed. Meanwhile I turn to Sir Stafford and Sir Walter Scott, from both of which I seem to reap some amusement, but not much. I seem to feel, as my uncle Charles did in his latter days, that I have read all that I find in books already; but then his array of books was not large, and he had no Cawthorn. CHARLES MERIVALE TO DEAN LAKE. ELY, February 19, 1891. Have you anything to tell me about the scheme you seem to have in view for electricizing your cathedral? I have no courage for any such undertaking, nor fortunately have we any such funds. You may make a very fine thing of it; I only hope you will not do any damage. For myself I get just a little weaker and less and less locomotive day by day; but my canons are very indulgent and make no complaint of my abstaining from cathedral almost wholly. I just took advantage of a gleam of sunshine on Sunday to attend a Litany service; but I could not quite stand through a long Psalm. You would be amused to see me wheeled in bath-chair, verger preceding and following to help me up those horrid stairs, which I don't suppose I shall ever be quite free of. My poor dear wife had a bad fall in descending them the other day, and has been laid in bed in consequence, but she is doing very well since and will, I trust, soon be right again. We have lost all count of the new bishops and deans, but I am very well satisfied with them as far as I know them. We have the honour of sending a minor canon-no-a President of the Theological College, as canon to St. Paul's; a very good preacher, with all the fashionable views of theology. How fortunate I have been in getting into port in reasonable time! How hopeless my case would be now! I devote myself now to Mudie and Cawthorn-Sedgwick, Milnes, Newman, have been my consolation, not to mention others of the same kind. Yes, I have tackled a good author, Doyle of Exeter— who is he?-who writes, I think very well, on England under the Tudors. But to say the truth I am hardly able now to follow a book of any pretension, and have almost given up my Greek. By-the-by, the new Aristotle seems to have fallen dead-who cares? I have not read the ten volumes I have of his earlier works. Well, I am getting rather foolish and shall shut up. Give my kind regards-ours I should say-to Mrs. Lake. CHARLES MERIVALE TO HIS SON CHARLES. ELY, March 11, 1891. Thank you for remembering and signalizing my birthday. I am doing very well in my eighty-fourth year. I remember well Uncle Charles Drury in his latter days remarking, 'The Heaths and Drurys seem to have generally lived to eighty-four, let us stick to it.' I hope these fogs lend you light enough to read my decrepit writing, which must be very trying even to your young sight. I begin quite recently to feel my eyes fail a good deal by candlelight, and don't know what I shall do if my reading powers decline. I generally occupy myself with a book six or eight hours in the day. Yesterday I got through Froude's Beaconsfield and enjoyed it very much. I don't often get such a treat. It is much superior to the volumes on crossing Greenland', and I am sorry to say I have quite outgrown Swift's works. I tried a chapter of Thackeray the other day, but without success. CHARLES MERIVALE TO HIS SISTER-IN-LAW, MRS. J. E. FRERE. ELY, December 27, 1891. I must really try to write you a letter at this Christmas-tide, which I hope you have been enjoying like ourselves, though you will have hardly had such a superabundance of happiness and 1 Nansen's Across Greenland. blessing as we with our very full house, and the presence of such a full representation of our now numerous family. Thank God they are all well and full of Christmas rejoicing, reminding me very sensibly of many such seasons years ago, when my father could get all his twelve children, including one grandchild, to dine together on two turkeys and many other satisfactions. W. and M. are, as you know, on the point of returning to Costa Rica. They will leave their four eldest with us, and be satisfied, we hope, with one, the youngest, to take with them. I cannot expect to see them again-but no more of that. The four we shall still have with us make a good handful. This is a very cheerful day after a succession of frosts and fogs which have been almost killing. . . . I have been amusing my party by making out a list of friends and personal acquaintances still living in December, 1891-sixty-three in number, all octogenarians indeed sixty-four, including myself. Pretty well. I must send you the list some day'. 1 See Appendix. CONCLUSION Tats was the last letter to Mrs. Frere. She died on May 5, 1892. A few weeks before that, on Feb. 17, a slight paralytic seirure had fallen upon the dean, depriving him almost enurely of the power to write, and affecting also, though in a lesser degree, his power of speech. A few short notes, one to his eldest grandson on going to Winchester, another to Dean Lake, were written or dietated in the course of that spring, and then the pen which had been so constantly in his hand all through life was laid aside. Through that summer and the next he waited, patient and trustful, for the end which could not now be far off. Sometimes he would take a drive in his wheel-chair round the College precincts or into the cathedral, or he would sit for an hour in the garden watching the men at work upon the cathedral roof, or his grandchildren at play. The evenings were passed in reading aloud from the packets of old letters sent from Barton Place, from some recent memoir, or a volume of Macaulay's Historyor his own History, which he declared he had quite forgotten and found very interesting! And so the months wore on, and always the decline was very gradual, very gentle, soothed by the tender affection of family and friends, and cheered by his own sweet temper and playful wit, which threw bright gleams even over the pain and weariness of his last illness. Towards the close of November, 1893, a day or two of exceptionally cold weather brought on another stroke. He took to his bed, and lay for three weeks, hovering between life and death. Then the end came, peaceful and beautiful, on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 27. A week later the body of Charles Merivale was laid in the grave in the cemetery at Ely, by the side of his old friends, Dean Peacock and William Selwyn. Epitaph on the monument in Ely Cathedral, by Rev. H. M. Butler, D.D., Master of Trinity. IN MEMORY OF CHARLES MERIVALE, D.D., D.C.L., 1873 HISTORIAN OF THE ROMANS UNDER THE EMPIRE, AND FOR TWENTY-FOUR YEARS DEAN OF THIS CATHEDRAL CHURCH. SPRUNG FROM A FAMILY OF SCHOLARS, HIMSELF RICH IN LEARNING, CAUSTIC IN WIT, JUST, WISE, TENDER, MAGNANIMOUS, HE WON AT EACH STAGE OF A LONG AND TRANQUIL LIFE HONOUR, CONFIDENCE, AND LOVE. |