So he slipped down the hill in a happy, kind old age. In summer he rose at five, read for an hour, wrote his letters, and burned most of those which he received. Then he had his head shaved, and washed in cold water, dressed, took a drive, or pottered in his garden. Heaven made gardens, surely, for the pottering peace of virtuous eld. At twelve he dined, chiefly on vegetables, taking but one glass of sherry. He had always four or five guests, and, after dinner, left them ‘to make the coffee’—that is, to enjoy a _siesta_. He never remembered to have remained awake a moment when once his head touched the pillow. Then he took coffee, played piquet, pottered again in the garden, supped on chocolate, and so to bed early. He read much, and thanked a slight loss of memory for the pleasure of being able to read all his favourite authors over again. Rabelais, Montaigne, and Molière were his favourites in French, in English, Shakspeare and the old dramatists. Terence and Plautus he studied in Latin, the Greek writers ‘in cribs.’ Tragedy he could not abide; mirth he loved, and d’Alembert’s informant had come on him laughing aloud when alone. He was full of anecdote, and, having known everybody of note for some seventy years, his talk was delightful. For music, he preferred the pibroch in a strange land, as did Charles, alone and old in Italy. One touch of nature! He was kindness itself, and loved giving; from Rousseau he met, we are told, the usual amount of gratitude after the quarrel with Hume. But, judging from what Rousseau himself says, on this occasion he was not ungrateful. If he heard, in conversation, a tale of misery, he made no remark, but sought out and succoured the person in distress. To every one who visited him he insisted on making some little present. He maintained a poor woman in comfort; nay, ‘down to spiders and frogs, he was the friend of all created things.’ Being a piquet player of the first force, he would only stake halfpence, and, when his winnings accumulated, laid them out in a feast of fat things for Snell, his big dog. Like Lionardo da Vinci, he could not bear to see a caged bird. In his last years he was drawn about in a garden chair, his legs failing him. His mortal agony was long and patiently borne: never before had he been ill. ‘Can your physic take fifty years off my life?’ he asked the doctor. He died merely of long life, on May 25, 1778. In 1770 he had described himself to his kinsman, Sir Robert Murray Keith, as ‘nearly eighty.’ In 1778, then, he cannot have been ninety-two, as Mr. Carlyle supposed—probably he was about eighty-five. Years of trouble and sorrow these years would have been to another, but ‘a merry heart goes all the way.’ Physically, and mentally, and morally, the Earl had ever been an example of soundness. In his latest illness he was never peevish. Once ‘he wished he were among the Eskimo, for they knock old men on the head.’