The Visitors continued the printing, Halley being the editor, and the work appeared in 1712 under the title of _Historia Coelestis_. This seemed to Flamsteed the greatest wrong of all. The work as it appeared seemed to him so full of errors, wilfully or accidentally inserted, as to be the greatest blot upon his fair fame, and he set himself, though now an old man, to work it out _de novo_ and at his own expense. To that purpose he devoted the remaining seven years of his life. Few things can be more pathetic than the letters which he wrote in that period referring to it. He was subject to the attacks of one of the cruelest of all diseases--the stone; he was at all times liable to distracting headaches. He had been, from his boyhood, a great sufferer from rheumatism, and yet, in spite of all, he resolutely pushed on his self-appointed task. The following extract from one of his letters will give a more vivid idea of the brave old man than much description:-- 'I can still, I praise God for it, walk from my door to the Blackheath gate and back, with a little resting at some benches I have caused to be set up betwixt them. But I found myself so tired with getting up the hill when I return from church, that at last I have bought a sedan, and am carried thither in state on Sunday mornings and back; I hope I may employ it in the afternoons, though I have not hitherto, by reason of the weather is too cold for me.' After the death of Queen Anne, a change in the ministry enabled him to secure that three hundred copies of the total impression of four hundred of the _Historia Coelestis_ were handed over to him. These, except the first volume, containing his sextant observations (which had received his own approval), he burned, 'as a sacrifice to heavenly truth.' His own great work had advanced so far that the first volume was printed, and much of the second, when he himself died, on the last day of 1719. He was buried in the chancel of Burstow Church. The completion of his work took ten years more; a work of piety and regard on the part of his assistant, Joseph Crosthwait. When compared with the catalogues that have gone before, it was a work of wonderful accuracy. Nevertheless, as Caroline Herschel showed, nearly a century later, not a few errors had crept into it. Some of the stars are non-existent, others have been catalogued in more than one constellation; important stars have been altogether omitted. Perhaps the most serious fault arises from the neglect of Flamsteed to accept from Newton a practical hint, namely, to read the barometer and thermometer at the time of his observations. Nevertheless, the work accomplished was not only wonderful under the untoward conditions in which Flamsteed was placed; it was wonderful in itself, winning from Airy the following high encomium:--