it had from time to time taken aggravated
form.

His last public appearances were in April. On the 5th he took the chair
for the Newsvendors, whom he helped with a genial address in which even
his apology for little speaking overflowed with irrepressible humour. He
would try, he said, like Falstaff, "but with a modification almost as
large as himself," less to speak himself than to be the cause of
speaking in others. "Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a
snuff-shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand,
who, apparently having taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged
all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and
patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line." On the
30th of the same month he returned thanks for "Literature" at the Royal
Academy dinner, and I may preface my allusion to what he then said with
what he had written to me the day before. Three days earlier Daniel
Maclise had passed away. "Like you at Ely, so I at Higham, had the shock
of first reading at a railway station of the death of our old dear
friend and companion. What the shock would be, you know too well. It has
been only after great difficulty, and after hardening and steeling
myself to the subject by at once thinking of it and avoiding it in a
strange way, that I have been able to get any command over it or over
myself. If I feel at the time that I can be sure of the necessary
composure, I shall make a little reference to it at the Academy
to-morrow. I suppose you won't be there."[304] The reference made was
most touching and manly. He told those who listened that since he first
entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it had been his
constant fortune to number among his nearest and dearest friends members
of that Academy who had been its pride; and who had now, one by one, so
dropped from his side that he was grown to believe, with the Spanish
monk of whom Wilkie spoke, that the only realities around him were the
pictures which he loved, and all the moving life but a shadow and a
dream. "For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and
most constant companions of Mr. Maclise, to whose death the Prince of
Wales has made allusion, and the President has referred with the
eloquence of genuine feeling. Of his genius in his chosen art, I will
venture to say nothing here; but of his fertility of mind and wealth of
intellect I may confidently assert t