the lecturer was silent after the delivery of the foregoing lecture; and his busy pencil at length idle. John Opie died, childless, in the house in Berners Street where he had lived for sixteen years, in the forty-sixth year of his age. He had loving nurses in his devoted wife and a most affectionate sister; he had also the advantage of no less than six medical attendants, who saw him daily--frequently three or four times a day. But the exact nature of his illness seems not to have been quite understood,[126] and all was in vain; he lingered awhile, and died, as he had lived, a painter. His friend and pupil, Henry Thomson, R.A.,[127] had been called in to complete the background and robes of one of Opie's finest portraits, for the forthcoming Exhibition. It was a likeness of the Duke of Gloucester. 'It wants more colour in the background,' said Opie, in the intervals of his deathbed delirium. More was added, but he continued to express himself dissatisfied:--the delirium returned; and he continued (in imagination) at his easel, until he breathed his last on the 9th April, 1807. And his prophecy as to his place of burial was fulfilled: 'Aye, girl,' he once said to his sister, 'I, too, shall be buried at St. Paul's.' There he was laid on the 20th April (close to Barry), in the crypt, by the side of a yet more illustrious artist from the West-country,--Sir Joshua Reynolds. Benjamin West's remains followed in 1820. Vandyke had long before been buried near the same spot. Fuseli, and Lawrence, and Turner, followed them. Amongst the distinguished men who were his pall-bearers were two eminent Cornishmen, Lord De Dunstanville and Sir John St. Aubyn, his friends, and (the former especially) his patrons. We have seen something of Opie's career as an artist, and of his grasp as a writer: it remains to say something of his private character. The predominant features of it seem to me to be a lofty, unselfish ambition for excellence, a deep earnestness and stern truthfulness combined with a most affectionate placable disposition, a generous heart, and no inconsiderable sense of humour. He was never idle for a moment, his wife says--he painted all day long, and grudged himself the shortest holiday; but he never made sufficient progress to satisfy himself, and would sometimes exclaim: 'I shall never, never make a painter.' As in his youth, so in his manhood, he was liable to fits of depression, from one of which he especially suffered during a gloomy three months at the end of the year 1802, when commissions for a short while came in slowly. He recovered his spirits, however, at the beginning of the following year, when more work came to him, and from that time to the very last he was full of commissions. The last work he finished was a head of Miranda, and it was one of his best.