he last half hour he had stood up, with
his eyes intently fixed upon Mr. Clare. He witnessed the last gasp, the
last little convulsive motion of the frame. He continued to look; he
sometimes imagined that he saw life renewed. At length he could deceive
himself no longer, and exclaimed with a distracted accent, "And is this
all?" He would have thrown himself upon the body of his friend; the
attendants withheld, and would have forced him into another apartment.
But he struggled from them, and hung fondly over the bed. "Is this the
end of genius, virtue, and excellence? Is the luminary of the world thus
for ever gone? Oh, yesterday! yesterday! Clare, why could not I have
died in your stead? Dreadful moment! Irreparable loss! Lost in the very
maturity and vigour of his mind! Cut off from a usefulness ten thousand
times greater than any he had already exhibited! Oh, his was a mind to
have instructed sages, and guided the moral world! This is all we have
left of him! The eloquence of those lips is gone! The incessant activity
of that heart is still! The best and wisest of men is gone, and the
world is insensible of its loss!"

Mr. Tyrrel heard the intelligence of Mr. Clare's death with emotion, but
of a different kind. He avowed that he had not forgiven him his partial
attachment to Mr. Falkland, and therefore could not recall his
remembrance with kindness. But if he could have overlooked his past
injustice, sufficient care, it seems, was taken to keep alive his
resentment. "Falkland, forsooth, attended him on his death-bed, as if
nobody else were worthy of his confidential communications." But what
was worst of all was this executorship. "In every thing this pragmatical
rascal throws me behind. Contemptible wretch, that has nothing of the
man about him! Must he perpetually trample upon his betters? Is every
body incapable of saying what kind of stuff a man is made of? caught
with mere outside? choosing the flimsy before the substantial? And upon
his death-bed too? [Mr. Tyrrel with his uncultivated brutality mixed, as
usually happens, certain rude notions of religion.] Sure the sense of
his situation might have shamed him. Poor wretch! his soul has a great
deal to answer for. He has made my pillow uneasy; and, whatever may be
the consequences, it is he we have to thank for them."

The death of Mr. Clare removed the person who could most effectually
have moderated the animosities of the contending parties, and took away
the g