Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since 1777, when he lay sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife nursed him tenderly into what seemed to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He was but forty-one years old, and, for all his genius, left no more trace behind than that Persian prince who suddenly disappeared in the shape of a butterfly, and whom old Burton calls a “light phantastick fellow.” His air of boyish promise, quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his friends into prophecies of his fame. He did not give events a chance to put immortality on his “bright, unbowed, insubmissive head.” Yet he was bitterly mourned. “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save him,” cried Johnson, who had loved him for over twenty years; and again, to Lord Althorp: “This is a loss, sir, that perhaps the whole nation could not repair.” Boswell mentions the Doctor’s April stroll, at this time, while he was writing his _Lives of the Poets_; and tells us how, returning from a call on the widow of the companion of his youth, David Garrick, he leaned over the rails of the Adelphi Terrace, watching the dark river, and thinking of “two such friends as cannot be supplied.” “Poor dear Beauclerk!” Johnson wrote, when his violent grief had somewhat subsided, “_nec, ut soles, dabis joca!_ His wit and his folly, his acuteness and his maliciousness, his merriment and his reasoning, are alike over. Such another will not often be found among mankind.” Beyond this well-known and characteristic summing-up, the Doctor made no discoverable mention, in his correspondence, of his bereavement, certainly not to the highly-prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to whom he wrote often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk’s death. Nor shall we know how the catastrophe affected Bennet Langton; for all the most interesting papers relating to him were destroyed when the old Hall at Langton-by-Spilsby was burned in 1855. On this subject, as on others as intimate, he stands, perforce, silent.