his life, and trust to an intellectual
spirit at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his
latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur. No--a man is apt to
be too much fagged and exhausted, both in body and mind, at such a time,
to be reliable; and maybe the very thing he wants to say, he cannot
think of to save him; and besides there are his weeping friends
bothering around; and worse than all as likely as not he may have to
deliver his last gasp before he is expecting to. A man cannot always
expect to think of a natty thing to say under such circumstances, and so
it is pure egotistic ostentation to put it off. There is hardly a case
on record where a man came to his last moment unprepared and said a good
thing hardly a case where a man trusted to that last moment and did not
make a solemn botch of it and go out of the world feeling absurd.

Now there was Daniel Webster. Nobody could tell him anything. He was not
afraid. He could do something neat when the time came. And how did it
turn out? Why, his will had to be fixed over; and then all the relations
came; and first one thing and then another interfered, till at last he
only had a chance to say, "I still live," and up he went.

Of course he didn't still live, because he died--and so he might as
well have kept his last words to himself as to have gone and made such
a failure of it as that. A week before that fifteen minutes of calm
reflection would have enabled that man to contrive some last words that
would have been a credit to himself and a comfort to his family for
generations to come.

And there was John Quincy Adams. Relying on his splendid abilities
and his coolness in emergencies, he trusted to a happy hit at the last
moment to carry him through, and what was the result? Death smote him
in the House of Representatives, and he observed, casually, "This is the
last of earth." The last of earth! Why "the last of earth" when there
was so much more left? If he had said it was the last rose of summer
or the last run of shad, it would have had as much point in it. What he
meant to say was, "Adam was the first and Adams is the last of earth,"
but he put it off a trifle too long, and so he had to go with that
unmeaning observation on his lips.

And there we have Napoleon's "Tete d'armee." That don't mean anything.
Taken by itself, "Head of the army," is no more important than "Head of
the police." And yet that was a man who could have sa