200 ANIMAL PAINTERS 



ordinary capacity for work and his energy was 

 untiring. To the last he was an early riser, and of 

 abstemious habit ; for the last forty years of his life 

 he drank only water. When seventy-nine years 

 of age he was so active that on two or three 

 occasions in one month he walked from his house 

 in Somerset Street to the Earl of Clarendon's place, 

 The Grove, between Watford and Tring, a distance 

 of sixteen miles, carrying a small portmanteau ; and 

 this before ten o'clock in the morning. On July 

 9th, 1806, he walked eight or nine miles, a feat 

 that shows he retained his bodily vigour to the 

 very last ; for in the morning of the following day 

 he was found dead in his chair. The Sporting 

 Magazine, in an appreciative obituary notice, states 

 that Stubbs was " so fully persuaded of the possi- 

 bility to prolong his own existence to the patriarchal 

 age of one hundred and fifty, that he most cheer- 

 fully began his Comparative Anatomy, after the 

 plan of Professor Blumenbach, at the period of 

 eighty, promising a complete classification of the 

 Animal World as an additaynentjim to an under- 

 taking so laborious — a work that would require at 

 least thirty years of good health and perfect 

 memory to accomplish." He was in his eighty- 

 second year when he died on July loth, 1806, at 

 his house in Somerset Street. He was buried 

 at St. Marylebone. 



