For now the end had come. When he went in to dinner Miss Hogarth
noticed that he looked very ill, and wished at once to send for a
doctor. But he refused, struggled for a short space against the
impending fit, and tried to talk, at last very incoherently. Then,
when urged to go up to his bed, he rose, and, almost immediately, slid
from her supporting arm, and fell on the floor. Nor did consciousness
return. He passed from the unrest of life into the peace of eternity
on the following day, June 9, 1870, at ten minutes past six in the
evening.

And now he lies in Westminster Abbey, among the men who have most
helped, by deed or thought, to make this England of ours what it is.
Dean Stanley only gave effect to the national voice when he assigned
to him that place of sepulture. The most popular, and in most
respects the greatest novelist of his time; the lord over the laughter
and tears of a whole generation; the writer, in his own field of
fiction, whose like we shall probably not see again for many a long,
long year, if ever; where could he be laid more fittingly for his last
long sleep than in the hallowed resting-place which the country sets
apart for the most honoured of her children?

So he lies there among his peers in the Southern Transept. Close
beside him sleep Dr. Johnson, the puissant literary autocrat of his
own time; and Garrick, who was that time's greatest actor; and Handel,
who may fittingly claim to have been one of the mightiest musicians of
all time. There sleeps, too, after the fitful fever of his troubled
life, the witty, the eloquent Sheridan. In close proximity rests
Macaulay, the artist-historian and essayist. Within the radius of a
few yards lies all that will ever die of Chaucer, who five hundred
years ago sounded the spring note of English literature, and gave to
all after-time the best, brightest glimpse into mediaeval England; and
all that is mortal also of Spenser of the honey'd verse; and of
Beaumont, who had caught an echo of Shakespeare's sweetness if not his
power; and of sturdy Ben Jonson, held in his own day a not unworthy
rival of Shakespeare's self; and of "glorious" and most masculine John
Dryden. From his monument Shakespeare looks upon the place with his
kindly eyes, and Addison too, and Goldsmith; and one can almost
imagine a smile of fellowship upon the marble faces of those later
dead--Burns, Coleridge, Southey, and Thackeray.

Nor in that great place of the dead does Dick