STEVENSON (Robert Louis, English author), 1850-1894. "_What is that?_" He felt a sudden pain in his head, and, clasping his forehead with both hands, he exclaimed, "What is that?" and soon after ceased to breathe.[43] The Academy tells this of Stevenson: "An old friend had set his beautiful lines to music: Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live, and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill. "He said one evening at his happy home in Merton Abbey, before he started on his last journey, that, when out in the Sudan, he crooned himself to sleep night after night with those lines which had been set to music by his friend. It is fitting that he should lie at rest out there in the spacious country, under the wide and starry sky." [43] According to a writer in the Chicago "Open Court," the main cause of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson was probably his consumption of tobacco. Two years before his death he confessed that his bill for cigars amounted to $450 a year; and during the last six months of his life he smoked an average of forty cigarettes per day, and often as many as eighty in twenty-four hours. Can any one wonder that this frightful habit induced chronic insomnia, to cure or lessen which he smoked all night, till narcosis of the brain brought on stupefaction and temporary loss of consciousness--for weeks his nearest approach to refreshing slumber. His physician warned him in vain that he was burning life's candle at both ends, for he tried to write in spite of his misery; but he stuck to nicotine as the only specific for his nervousness, with the result that was inevitable,--his death a year afterwards.-- _Mathews: "Nugae Litterariae."_ STONEHOUSE (Sir James, English physician and clergyman), 1716-1795. "_Precious salvation!_" STROZZI (Filippo, Florentine statesman), 1488-1538. He committed suicide while imprisoned by Cosmo de' Medici, the first Great Duke of Tuscany. As he was dying he cut with the point of his sword upon the mantel-piece, this line from Virgil: "_Exariare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor._" SUMNER (Charles, distinguished United States Senator and opponent of slavery. He was a man of great learning in history, political science and polite literature; and, notwithstanding the rare culture of his mind and tastes, he was always the defender of the poor and enslaved), 1811-1874. "_Sit down_," to his friend, Hon. Samuel Hooper. As he uttered these words his heart ruptured, a terrible convulsion shook his frame, and death came at once.[44]