"What becomes of poor dear Collins? I wrote him a letter which he never answered. I suppose writing is very troublesome to him. That man is no common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that understanding may make its appearance and depart, that it may blaze and expire." In this state of mental darkness did Collins pass the last six or seven years of his existence, in the house now occupied by Mr. Mason, a bookseller in Chichester. His malady is described by Johnson as being, not so much an alienation of mind as a general laxity and feebleness of his vital, rather than his intellectual, powers; but his disorder seems, from other authorities, to have been of a more violent nature. As he was never married, he was indebted for protection and kindness to his youngest sister; and death, the only hope of the afflicted, came to his relief on the 12th of June, 1759, in the thirty-ninth year of his age, a period of life when the fervour of imagination is generally chastened without being subdued, and when all the mental powers are in their fullest vigour. He was buried in the church of St. Andrew, at Chichester, on the 15th of June; and the admiration of the public for his genius has been manifested by the erection of a monument by Flaxman, to his memory, in the Cathedral, which is thus described by Mr. Dallaway, the historian of Sussex: "Collins is represented as sitting in a reclining posture, during a lucid interval of the afflicting malady to which he was subject, with a calm and benign aspect, as if seeking refuge from his misfortunes in the consolations of the gospel, which appears open on a table before him, whilst his lyre and one of his best compositions lie neglected on the ground. Upon the pediment of the table are placed two female ideal figures in relief, representing love and pity, entwined each in the arms of the other; the proper emblems of the genius of his poetry." It bears the following epitaph from the pen of Hayley: