A Biographical Sketch 



and at times he would be quite delirious, talking incoherently and 

 raving of dread visions. A sudden knock at the door, the over- 

 turning of a chair, or any other noise, would cause him to tremble 

 violently, and even to fall off his chair. At night he would sometimes 

 wander out in an aimless way, afraid of the dark, yet unable to stay 

 in the house, and once he was found in the street lying on the snow, 

 half-frozen and unconscious. After repeated strokes the unhappy 

 man lost the use of his left hand, so that he could no longer hold 

 his palettes, and now fell into such an utter state of dejection that 

 he shunned all company, or if with other people was moody and 

 silent, drowsing off into a stupid sleep. 



At last he was arrested for a debt not exceeding ten pounds to 

 a certain publican, and carried off to a " sponging " house in Eyre 

 Street Hill, Coldbath Fields. He endeavoured to procure some 

 money by painting, but while sketching out a landscape he fell off 

 his chair in a fit. The end was near. For eight days he suffered 

 from brain fever, delirious all the time, and never once recovering 

 consciousness. Death came to him on the 29th of October, 1804, 

 when he was only 42 years of age. 



His friends endeavoured to keep the news from Mrs. Morland, 

 as she had always had a presentiment that she and her husband 

 would die at the same time. But something told her that George 

 was dead, and the friends who endeavoured to calm her in her 

 hysterical state by contradicting her — a foolish and unwarrantable 

 thing, as it seems to us now — could not persuade her to believe 

 them. When they did confess to the truth, the unhappy woman 

 gave a shriek, and falling into convulsions, which continued for three 

 days, she died on the second of November. She was only thirty- 

 seven years old, and there were only four days between the death 

 of husband and wife, who were buried together in the graveyard of 

 St. James's Chapel. 



Literary moralising has now gone out of fashion, but one can 

 hardly end an account of George Morland's life without reflecting 

 upon the terrible way in which the man of genius, in whose character 

 one may find many delightful and endearing qualities, wilfully 

 wrecked his life and his wife's happiness by a reckless folly and a 

 wanton debauchery. But "the evil that men do lives after them, 



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