Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last representative of his race. Southey observes that _Pauli in domo præter se nemo superest_, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician, he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was often in the Doctor’s mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling. Michelet’s record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, “All that fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had taken effect.” So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one’s children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man. Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis Vere’s three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of Ormond, that he outlived “the noble-minded Ossory,” worthy son of such a sire. “The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build their children’s tomb.” Young’s is that truism; and Pope’s is the cognate query, “Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne’er gave, lamented Digby, sunk thee to the grave? “Tell me, if virtue made the son expire, Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?” Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly extinct. “This man was the last of his house,” he says, is not an uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer’s Phænops, in feeble age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön: “Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs Of all his labours, and a life of cares. Cold death o’ertakes them in their blooming years, And leaves the father unavailing tears. To strangers now descends his heapy store, The race forgotten, and the name no more.”