“I was the first to see him when struck down by _hemiplegia_. It was in Shandwick Place, where he had his chambers,—sleeping and enjoying his evenings in his beautiful Millbank, with its flowers, its matchless orchids and heaths and azaleas, its bananas and grapes and peaches: with Blackford Hill,—where Marmion saw the Scottish host mustering for Flodden,—in front, and the Pentlands, with Cairketton Hill, their advanced guard, cutting the sky, its ruddy porphyry _scaur_ holding the slanting shadows in its bosom. He was, as before said, in his room in Shandwick Place, sitting in his chair, having been set up by his faithful Blackbell. His face was distorted. He said—‘John, this is the conclusion’; and so it was, to his, and our, and the world’s sad cost. He submitted to his fate with manly fortitude, but he felt it to the uttermost,—struck down in his prime, full of rich power, abler than ever to do good to men, his soul surviving his brain, and looking on at its steady ruin during many sad months. He became softer, gentler,—more easily moved, even to tears; but the judging power, the perspicacity, the piercing to the core, remained untouched. Henceforward, of course, life was maimed. How he bore up against this, resigning his delights of teaching, of doing good to men, of seeing and cherishing his students, of living in the front of the world,—how he accepted all this only those nearest him can know. I have never seen anything more pathetic than when, near his death, he lay speechless, but full of feeling and mind, and made known in some inscrutable way to his old gardener and friend that he wished to see a certain orchid which he knew should be then in bloom. The big, clumsy, knowing Paterson, glum and victorious (he was for ever getting prizes at the Horticultural), brought it,—the _Stanhopea Tigrina_,—in without a word. It was the very one,—radiant in beauty, white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen’s mole, and, like it, ‘right proud of that most delicate lodging.’ He gazed at it, and, bursting into a passion of tears, motioned it away as insufferable.”