x SOBER AUTUMN HUES 113 



sons, all passed away within a few years ; " My path," 

 he said, " seems to be over the ashes of my children." 

 He had high hopes of his eldest son, whom he had trained 

 as a physician with unsparing pains, and the young man 

 seems to have been fully worthy of them. 1 An enduring 

 sadness fell upon the father's life, yet, quaint even in 

 his sorrow, he remarked that his son had quitted " the 

 Society of Friends for that of Angels." A train of 

 adverse circumstances, due in part to his own prodigality, 

 but chiefly to the accommodation of a near relative, 

 involved Lettsom in heavy losses, and he had to part with 

 his beautiful villa and most of his library and museum ; 

 a large fortune, which was later awarded to him, he did 

 not live to enjoy. 



But he worked steadily on, neither crushed nor em- 

 bittered by adversity, attending to his lessened practice, 

 writing, speaking, enquiring, proposing for the public 

 and private good. Time failed him for all that he still 

 wished to do. " There was no crabbedness in his age. 

 It was not like a winter, but like a fine summer evening, 

 or a mild autumn, or like the light of a harvest moon." 2 

 He enjoyed in his latest years the friendship of a young 

 man of scientific tastes and ceaseless activity of mind like 

 unto his own, Dr. T. J. Pettigrew. He was Lettsom's 

 fidus Achates, and became his biographer. " I am seventy 

 years of age," writes Lettsom to Dr. Joshua Dixon, of 

 Whitehaven, " and would fain live another year to effect 

 some literary objects before I emigrate ad sedes <zthereas 

 unde negat redire quemquam." A few days after writing 

 these lines an attack of acute illness came upon him, said 

 to be rheumatic fever, but probably septic poisoning, 

 following a post-mortem examination. But he must 

 needs go out to visit a poor patient in Whitecross Street ; 



1 This son left an orphan, William Nanson Lettsom (b. 1796, d. 1865), who 

 became a scholar of some distinction : he translated the Nibelungenlied (1850), 

 and published studies on Shakespeare. See Diet. Nat. Biog. ; Notes and 

 Queries, 3rd series, viii. 500, ix. 49. Another son, Samuel Fothergill 

 Lettsom, died at Boulogne, 1844, aged sixty-five years. Lettsom's descendants 

 are extinct in the male line, but are represented by families of Gronow and 

 Elliot through female descent, and by Mrs. T. C. Colyer-Fergusson. 



2 Quoted by Pettigrew of Lettsom, from Southey's The Doctor. 



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