What so grievously changed him? I do not believe that he was soured by pecuniary misfortune, though he had more than enough. His first great misfortune--the marriage of his old widower uncle, whose heir he was to have been--was, I have the means of knowing, borne by him well, bravely and with dignity. I believe that he was destroyed mind and body by calomel, habitually used during long years. Throughout life he was a laborious and industrious man. I have seen few things of the kind with more of pathos in it than his persevering attempt to render his labour of some value by compiling a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms. He had quite sufficient learning and sufficient industry to have produced an useful book upon the subject if he had only had the possibility of consulting the, of course, almost innumerable necessary authorities. The book was published in quarto by subscription, and two or three parts of it had been delivered to the subscribers when death delivered him from his thankless labour and his subscribers from further demands on their purses. I do not suppose that any human being purchased the book because they wished to possess it. And truly, as I have said, it was a pathetic thing to see him in his room at Château d’Hondt, ill, suffering, striving with the absolutely miserable, ridiculously insufficient means he had been able with much difficulty to collect, to carry on his work. He was dying--he must, I think, have known that he was; he had not got beyond D in his dictionary; all the alphabet was before him, but he would not give up; he would labour to the last. My mother was labouring hard, and her labour was earning all that supplied very abundantly the needs of the whole family. And I cannot help thinking that a painful but not ignoble feeling urged my poor father to live at least equally laborious days, even though his labour was profitless. Poor father! My thoughts as I followed him to the grave were that I had not done all that I might have done to alleviate the burthen of unhappiness that was laid upon him. Yet looking back on it all from the vantage-ground of my own old age (some fifteen years greater than that which he attained) I do not see or think that any conduct of mine would have made matters better for him.