Langton bore Johnson’s pall; and he succeeded him as Professor of Ancient Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gibbon had replaced Goldsmith in the chair of Ancient History. He survived many years, the delight of his company to the last. He, like others, was given in his later years to detailing anecdotes of his great friend, with an approximation to that friend’s manner. One lady critic, at least, thought that these explosive imitations did not become “his own serious and respectable character.” On December 18, 1801, in Anspach Place, Southampton, a venerable nook “between the walls and the sea,” when Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their unheralded prime, when Charles Lamb was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on the Cotswold hills, and Keats and Shelley little fair-eyed children, gentle Bennet Langton, known to none of these, and somewhat forgotten as a loiterer from the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped out of life. “I am persuaded,” wrote one who knew him well, “that all his inactivity, all the repugnance he showed to putting on the harness of this world’s toil, arose from the spirituality of his frame of mind . . . I believe his mind was in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally existed.” He was laid under the chancel of ancient St. Michael’s at Southampton, with Johnson’s fond benison, “Be my soul with Langton’s!” inscribed on the marble tablet above him.[57] The Rev. John Wooll of Midhurst, Joseph Warton’s editor, was one of the few present at the funeral ceremony, and he leaves us to infer that it had a rather neglectful privacy, not, indeed, out of keeping with the “godly, righteous, and sober life” it closed. Langton’s will, drawn up in the June of 1800, and preserved in Somerset House, devised to the sole executrix, his “dear wife,” who outlived him by nearly twenty years, his real and personal estate, his books, his wines, his prints, his horses, and, as a gift particularly pretty, his right of navigation in the river Wey. George Langton was separately provided for, but there were some £8000 for the eight younger children. The document is crowded with technical details, and very long; and the manifest inference, on the whole, is that the dear squire’s affairs were in a prodigious tangle. There is no wish expressed concerning his burial, and, what is more curious, there are no Christian formulas for the committal of the _animula vagula blandula_: a lack perhaps not to be wondered at in Beauclerk’s concise testament, but somewhat notable in the case of a person who certainly had a soul.