In the retirement of this mournful interval of personal sickness and mental dejection, Dr. Burney composed the following elegy to the memory of Sir Joshua.
“Farewell, farewell, illustrious friend! Sent here thy art, and men, to mend; Farewell, dear friend!—in vain I try To think of thee without a sigh! If in life’s long and active round Thy equal I so rarely found, How, in my few remaining days, While nature rapidly decays, Can hope persuade, in flattering strain, Thy niche will e’er be fill’d again? Thy loss is not to art alone, Which placed thee on Apelles’ throne; Society has lost still more, Which both the good and wise deplore; Thy friends dispers’d, of joy bereft, No stand, no central point have left; For when fate cut thy vital thread, And number’d thee among the dead; To all who had seen thee give a glow Wherever wit and wisdom flow; Who, at thy hospitable board Had seen thee lov’d, rever’d, ador’d; Who knew thy comprehensive mind, Thy zeal for worth of every kind; Who, in thy Aristippan bowers, Forgot thy pencil’s magic powers,—
To these, the nation’s light and pride, Of wit the source, of taste the guide, From all the heart most precious deems, Thy loss an amputation seems.”
Another last separation, long menacing, yet truly grievous to the Doctor, was now almost momentarily impending. His good, gay-hearted, and talented old friend, Mr. Hayes, had had a new paralytic seizure, which, in the words of Dr. Burney, “deprived him of the use of one side, and greatly affected his speech, eyes, and ears; though his faculties were still as good and as sound as his heart.”
This account had been addressed, the preceding year, to George Earl of Orford, by desire of the poor invalid.
Pitiable as was this species of existence, Mr. Hayes long lingered in it, with a patience and cheerfulness that kept him still open to the kind offices, as well as to the compassion of his friends: and Dr. Burney held a regular correspondence with Lord Orford upon this subject, till it ceased from a calamitous catastrophe; not such as was daily expected to the ancient invalid, though then bed-ridden, and past eighty years of age, but to the Earl himself, from an attack of insanity.
This was a new grief. Lord Orford had been not only an early patron, but a familiar friend of the Doctor’s during the whole of his sojourn in Norfolk.