But Borlase was now getting an old man, being over seventy years of age. The friends of his youth were dying off; and he was unable to undertake the long antiquarian rambles which had been the delight of his stalwart days. His outdoor amusements began to be restricted to the superintendence (which he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed) of the improvement of the numerous roads which ran through his parish; one of which, it may be mentioned, was the highroad to Penzance, until that which now skirts the shore of the Mount's Bay was substituted for it. His literary labours consisted partly in writing his 'Sacræ Exercitationes,' which were chiefly paraphrases of Ecclesiastes, the Canticles of Solomon, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah--rather for his own pleasure than with any view to publication; and his home recreations were the 'Belles Lettres' and drawing and painting. He did not, however, neglect entirely his old pursuits; for he prepared for the press the new and enlarged edition of his 'Antiquities,' which, as we have seen, was published in 1769; and he busily engaged himself in a similar office for his 'Natural History,' which he did not live to complete. The emendations, however (or rather the principal of them), appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall for 1875. And during this latter part of his life, as well as during the previous years, he was occupied in collecting materials for a Parochial History of the County, which never saw the light. His last literary labour was a treatise on the 'Creation and the Deluge,' which contains some ingenious speculations on the nature of earthquakes and submarine upheavals. The beginning of this little work he had actually sent to the press; but a sudden and violent illness in 1771 warned him that he was overtaxing his strength, and he resolved not to go on with the publication. Within two or three months of his death he drew up a short memoir of his life, written in the third person, for his friend Huddesford, which closes in the following happy strain: 'Being now in his seventy-seventh year, very little more can be hoped for by himself or expected by others. 'Having been long accustomed to the confinement of his study, retirement and old age incessantly call upon him with the less terrour; and resignation to his increasing infirmities becomes every day easier and less irksome, till at last he now accounts it among the blessings of long life that it has quieted and extinguished every spark of ambition, and that it enables him to withdraw more and more with some decency from the world; precluding the perhaps well-intended, though rather too frequent visits of civility, in which there is generally more dissipation at all stages of life than real compensation for the waste of time, especially in the days of age.