Under this complication of interests, Ralegh, on the 24th of October, 1618, was given to understand that it was the King’s intent that he should be put to death, and that he should therefore prepare himself for the same.[242] Between that intimation and the fulfilment of his doom, the courage of the broken-spirited and diseased prisoner, prematurely old with sorrow and disappointment, gave way. He sought to anticipate his fate, and attempted suicide, but the wound which he gave himself by stabbing—a cut, rather than a stab—was not fatal, and he recovered to address to his disconsolate wife one of the most eloquent and heart-rending letters that ever emanated from that tomb of the living in which he passed the close of his days.[243] How Buckingham could hear of this last act of a mind almost frenzied with misery, of a being, to use Ralegh’s own words, “not tempted with Satan,” but only “tempted with sorrow, whose sharp teeth devour my heart,” and not plead for this ornament of his age, it is scarcely possible to conceive. He would have culled golden opinions for such an interference; he would have established a source of proud and consolatory recollections for his own heart; but he lost that glorious opportunity, and left the illustrious prisoner, to use his own words, to be a “wonder and a spectacle,” and went on in his own perilous career, until the hour of retribution, even to him, arrived. Footnote 242: Nichols, iii., p. 493. Footnote 243: It begins thus:—“Receive from thy unfortunate husband these, his last lines; these, the last words that ever thou shalt receive from him. That I can live, and think never to see you and my child more, I cannot. I have desired God, and disputed with my reason, but nature and compassion hath the victory. That I can live to think how you are both left a spoil to my enemies, and that my name shall be a dishonour to my child, I cannot—I cannot endure the memory thereof. Unfortunate woman! unfortunate child! comfort yourselves, trust God, and be contented with your poor estate; I would have bettered it, if I had enjoyed it a few years.”—Bishop Goodman, ii., p. 93. Mr. Brewer has, by the discovery of this letter, in the College of All Souls, Oxford, definitively settled the question whether Ralegh did or did not attempt his life in the Tower. Ralegh’s list of his debts, and his beseeching his wife “to take care of them,” are not among the least affecting parts of his letter. Ralegh’s execution was fixed to take place—so conscious was Government of the odium which it would incur—on the Lord Mayor’s Day, “that the pageants and fine shows might,” as Aubrey expresses it, “avocate and draw away the people from beholding the tragedie of the gallantest worthie that England ever bred.”[244] Footnote 244: Nichols, p. 493.