Nero’s death was a tragical one. In October, 1859, while walking out with the maid one evening, a butcher’s cart driving furiously round a sharp corner ran over his throat. He was not killed on the spot, although his mistress says “he looked killed enough at first.” The poor fellow was put into a warm bath, wrapped up in flannels, and left to die. The morning found him better, however; he was able to wag his tail in response to the caresses of his mistress. Little by little he recovered the use of himself, but it was ten days before he could bark. He lived four months after this, docile, affectionate, loyal up to his last hour, but weak and full of pain. The doctor was obliged at last to give him prussic acid. They buried him at the top of the garden in Cheyne Row, and planted cowslips round his grave, and his loving mistress placed a stone tablet, with name and date, to mark the last resting place of her blessed dog. “I could not have believed,” writes Carlyle in the Memorials, “my grief then and since would have been the twentieth part of what it was—nay, that the want of him would have been to me other than a riddance. Our last midnight walk together—for he insisted on trying to come—January 31st, is still painful to my thought. Little dim white speck of life, of love, fidelity, and feeling, girdled by the darkness of night eternal.” Is not that a delightful revelation of tenderness in the heart of the grand old growler, biographer, critic, historian, essayist, prophet, whom most people feared? I like to read it again and again. The selfish, cynical Horace Walpole sat up night after night with his dying Rosette. He wrote: “Poor Rosette has suffered exquisitely; you may believe I have too,” and honoured her with this epitaph: Sweetest roses of the year Strew around my Rose’s bier. Calmly may the dust repose Of my pretty, faithful Rose; And if yon cloud-topped hill behind This frame dissolved, this breath resigned, Some happier isle, some humbler heaven, Be to my trembling wishes given, Admitted to that equal sky May sweet Rose bear me company.