In his younger days he
suggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun;
towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness that
made him look like a duke or a market gardener. Like most clever men,
he had good eyes.
Nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the published
accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that
last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account
of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed--cold,
epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And
once more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry.
In the third scene of the second act of "Henry V.," a play written
by an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describes
the death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to need
quotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thus
that every man dies.
Blue Blood
He sat in the middle of the great cafe with his head supported
on his hands, miserable even to bitterness. Inwardly he cursed the
ancestors who had left him little but a great name and a small and
ridiculous body. He thought of his father, whose expensive
eccentricities had amused his fellow-countrymen at the cost of his
fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his
grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But
most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might
not wholly account.
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