Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/338

324 History, he was appointed his successor; nearly twenty years before, he had been a candidate for the professorship of modern history, but was put aside for Vivian, fellow of Balliol. A consolatory letter of Warburton is extant, in which that distinguished divine applauds his fortitude under the disappointment, and delicately informs him that his successful rival was suffering from an internal disease, which would most probably soon prove fatal!

The last work of importance on which he was engaged was the fulfilment of a design he had meditated nearly half a century, an edition of the minor and then but little known poems of Milton. His principal object in this publication was, as he himself declares, "to explain his author's allusions, to illustrate or to vindicate his beauties, to point out his imitations both of others and of himself, to elucidate his obsolete diction, and by the adduction and juxta-position of parallels universally gleaned both from his poetry and his prose, to ascertain his favourite words, and to show the peculiarities of his phraseology."

The sale of the book was unusually rapid, and he was meditating a new and more complete edition of his own poems, when the summons arrived which suspended all his labours. His end was painfully sudden. For sixty-two years he had enjoyed unbroken health, when he was seized by a severe attack of the gout. He went to Bath for medical aid, and returned, as he thought, restored; but those who knew him, beheld at once that a fatal change had passed over him. On Thursday, the 20th of May, 1790, he went as usual, after Hall, into the common room, and, always jocular among friends, it was remarked that evening, that he was more than ordinarily cheerful. Between ten and eleven, he was struck with paralysis, and by two o'clock the next day he was no more. His elder and only brother, Joseph, head master of Winchester School, with whom he had generally spent the long