Two years of literary and philosophic life in London succeeded to the Rhode Island idyl. In 1734 he returned to Ireland for the last time, and dwelt for eighteen years in his bishopric of Cloyne in studious seclusion with his family, wandering among the myrtle-hedges his own hand planted, reading Plato and Hooker, teaching his cherished daughter, suffering from domestic losses, and proclaiming to an astounded world that tar-water was a panacea for all human ills. Berkeley's genius and his eloquent prose made tar-water as popular as both had {296} made Bermuda some twenty years earlier. The later years of his life at Cloyne are tinged with melancholy. His mind began to be agitated anew with the dream of an academic retreat by other streams than the Blackwater and the Leo, and in 1752 he journeyed again to England and set up his tent for the last time beneath the shadow of the Oxford spires. It was mellow autumn when he came to the City of Scholars. In the chill January weather of the following year he died suddenly and peacefully in the midst of his family. He was a great and a good man. The serene purity of his life, his lofty purposes, his nobility of nature, cause him to stand out very conspicuously in the strange, cynical, cruel world of English life and English thought during the first half of the eighteenth century. He was in that world, but he was never of it. His friends were either noble of life and mind, or else he saw in them only their nobler qualities, and took no thought of or no harm from the rest. He seems to have been most happy--and the fact is characteristic of the man--in the society of the sweet, simple, and studious woman who made him a loving wife, and of the children whom he loved with an affection for the excess of which he sometimes reproached himself. All his contemporaries, says Sir James Mackintosh, agreed with Pope in ascribing "To Berkeley every virtue under heaven."