st and change might give. He was too ill
to take much pleasure in his sojourn there, but his bodily feebleness
did not dull his mental vigor, and it is characteristic that he at
once {p.xxxv} began to read Dante with Dr. Lucentini. He knew the
language well, but wished to master the difficulties of the great
poet, and so turned to the most accomplished of helpers, who naturally
found Lockhart a brilliant and acute pupil, the mention of whom ever
after roused the teacher to enthusiasm. No one, he declared, had ever
put him so on his mettle. The invalid wrote long letters, descriptive
of his Roman life, to his daughter, which show that he exerted himself
much beyond the little strength that remained to him, and in the
spring he gladly turned his face homeward. His resignation of his
editorship was now made absolute, and, with greatly diminished income
(his expenses in consequence of his son's follies had been heavy), he
prepared to leave the house which had been so long his, and seek some
new abiding-place. But his release was at hand. In August, he went to
Milton-Lockhart, to the kind care of his brother's household, always
writing as cheerfully as might be of himself to his daughter. "The
weather is delicious," he says in one of the last letters, "warm, very
warm, but a gentle breeze keeping the leaves in motion all about, and
the sun sheathed, as Wordsworth hath it, with a soft gray layer of
cloud. I am glad to fancy you all enjoying yourselves (I include sweet
M. M.) in this heavenly summer season. If people knew beforehand what
it is to lose health, and all that can't survive health, they would in
youth be what it is easy to preach; do you _try_? I fancy it costs
none of you very much effort either to be good or happy." In October
he went to Abbotsford, and it was at once seen that he was a dying
man. He had gone one day in "most heavenly weather," from
Milton-Lockhart to Douglas, where he had spent, in the old time, a
memorable summer day with the stricken Scott, of which he has left us
the record; and he now desired to be driven about to take leave of the
places on Tweedside, which then had been {p.xxxvi} a part of his
life. His little granddaughter was very dear to him in these last
days. It is still remembered, how, as he lay ill, he loved to hear her
running about the house. "It is life to me," he said. He died November
25, 1854, and was buried, as he had desired, in Dryburgh Abbey, "at
the feet of Sir Walter Sco