I adopt from Mr. Otter the following account of Clarke’s death. It was
hastened, if not entirely caused, by continued high-wrought mental
excitement. He was carried to town for advice by Sir William and Lady
Rush, where he was attended by Sir Astley Cooper, Dr. Bailey, and Dr.
Scudamore, but their efforts to save him were in vain; the rest of
his life, about a fortnight, over which a veil will soon be drawn,
was like a feverish dream after a day of strong excitement, when the
same ideas chase each other through the mind in a perpetual round,
and baffle every attempt to banish them. Nothing seemed to occupy his
attention but the syllabus of his lectures, and the details of the
operations he had just finished; nor could there exist to his friends
a stronger proof that all control over his mind was gone, and that the
ascendency of such thoughts at a season when the devotion so natural
to him, and of late so strikingly exhibited under circumstances far
less trying, would, in a sounder state, have been the prime, if not
the only, mover of his soul. One lucid interval there was, in which,
to judge from the subject and the manner of his conversation, he had
the command of his thoughts, as well as a sense of his danger; for in
the presence of Lieut. Chappel and Mr. Cripps, he pronounced a very
pathetic eulogium on Mrs. Clarke, and recommended her earnestly to the
care of those about him; but when the currents of his thoughts seemed
running fast towards those pious contemplations on which they would
naturally have rested, his mind suddenly relapsed into the power of its
former occupants, from which it never more was free. At times, indeed,
gleams of his former kindness and intelligence would mingle with the
wildness of his delirium, in a manner the most striking and affecting;
and then, even his incoherences, to use his own thoughts respecting
another person who had finished his race shortly before him, was as
the wreck of some beautiful decayed structure, when all its goodly
ornaments and stately pillars fall in promiscuous ruin. He died on
Saturday, the 9th of March, and was buried in Jesus College chapel on
the 18th of the same month.
FRANCOIS LE VAILLANT.
Born 1753.--Died 1824.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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