This
must have been almost as trying as the awkward, ungraceful deportment of
him whom he mourned. The world now left Chesterfield ere he had left the
world. He and his contemporary Lord Tyrawley were now old and infirm.
'The fact is,' Chesterfield wittily said, 'Tyrawley and I have been dead
these two years, but we don't choose to have it known.'
'The Bath,' he wrote to his friend Dayrolles, 'did me more good than I
thought anything could do me; but all that good does not amount to what
builders call half-repairs, and only keeps up the shattered fabric a
little longer than it would have stood without them; but take my word
for it, it will stand but a very little while longer. I am now in my
grand climacteric, and shall not complete it. Fontenelle's last words at
a hundred and three were, _Je souffre d'etre._ deaf and infirm as I am,
I can with truth say the same thing at sixty-three. In my mind it is
only the strength of our passions, and the weakness of our reason, that
makes us so fond of life; but when the former subside and give way to
the latter, we grow weary of being, and willing to withdraw. I do not
recommend this train of serious reflections to you, nor ought you to
adopt them.
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