Named among the valiant, yet more sad than heroic, was poor Heine on his "mattress-grave." Most pathetically did he lay himself down, this "soldier in the war for the liberation of humanity." Of the last time that Heine left the house before yielding to disease, he says: "With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and almost sank down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say, 'Dost thou not see that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?'" Not less touching was the pathos of Tom Hood, in his long years of consumption; but the tone was gayer than the gayest. See him write to a friend: "My dear Johnny, aren't you glad to hear now that I've only been ill and spitting blood three times since I left you, instead of being very dead indeed?" To this he adds: "But wasn't I in luck, after spitting blood and being bled, to catch the rheumatism in going down stairs!" One long struggle was his against prostration and over-work; but always the same buoyant wit,--writing the cheeriest things with an ebbing life; the hero fighting against fatal odds, but always under a light mask,--and ridiculing himself most of all;-- "I'm sick of gruel and the dietetics; I'm sick of pills and sicker of emetics; I'm sick of pulse's tardiness or quickness; I'm sick of blood, its thinness or its thickness; In short, within a word, I'm sick of sickness." And others there be, not heroes, who yet have simulated heroism in their blithe indifference to fate;--Lord Buckhurst, who is said to have "stuttered more wit in dying than most people have in their best health"; Wycherley, who took a young bride just before death, and was "neither afraid of dying nor ashamed of marrying"; Chesterfield, who in his last days, when going out for a London drive, used smilingly to say, "I must go and rehearse my funeral"; Pope, who was the victim of incessant disease, which yet never subdued his rhetoric; Scarron, a paralytic and a monstrosity, the merriest man in France, for whom the nation never gave any tears but those of laughter;--all these, down to the easy-minded old Dr. Garth, who died simply because he was tired of life,--"tired of having his shoes pulled on and off."