THE END. 



" Coming events cast their shadows before." 



HE motto adopted for this concluding chapter is, as is well known 

 to all acquainted with Landseer's works, the title he appended to one 

 of his most famous pictures ; and it can scarcely be considered inappro- 

 priate to what remains to be said of him. During the last two, or three 

 years of his Ufe, few who mixed much with artists and others associated 

 with -art-matters, were not cognisant of the fact, that both mentally and physically 

 the great painter's condition was most sad and afflictive, causing the greatest anxiety 

 to his relations and friends. For a very long time prior to his final illness, he was 

 often subjected to fits of great mental depression. " It was very striking,'' says the 

 writer of an excellent notice of the painter, which appeared in the Daily News ^ day 

 or two after his death, «' to hear his moralisings on life as he felt the weight of years 

 telling on his faculties. 'We use our lives unwisely,' he said, ' and very differently 

 from what we suppose when we set out. For the first five-and-twenty years we are 

 learning life, and entering upon it; for the next we live for, and in, some woman, who 

 engrosses us wholly. It is only when we are past fifty that we see things as they are 

 an! have command over them, and really begin to live a rational and self-pos^-d 

 life.' But his case was a hard one to manage. He expected to become entirely 

 deaf at forty, like the majority of his ancestors and his immediate ^^ ^ f ^^^ 

 not become deaf ; but he took out his share in other ways. He l-^^^^^^^2x 

 periods of extreme nervous depression, each proximately caused ^y ^2e7^s 

 shock. In one instance it was the murder of Lord Wilham Russell. In ^h r ca 

 it was other deaths of intimate friends ; and each time it appeared as if he could never 



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