he became desirous to escape from his inspection.
Her manner towards him changed. She was sometimes cold and sometimes
petulant. She did not conceal her joy when he left Streatham; she never
pressed him to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in
a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest. He
took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read, for the last
time, a chapter of the Greek testament in the library which had been
formed by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer he commended the house
and its inmates to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which
choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that
beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street,
where the few and evil days which still remained to him were to run out.
Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however,
he recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his
intellectual faculties. But other maladies came thick upon him. His
asthma tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their
appearance. While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard
that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen
years of his life had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was
crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled
with allusions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in Hamlet.
He vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence. He never
uttered her name. Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung
into the fire. She meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her
countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened
across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of
concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that the great man with whose
name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist.

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, clung
vehemently to life. The feeling described in that fine but gloomy paper
which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as
his last hour drew near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his
breath more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have set
out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the journey.
That expense, indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid
up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labours