Poor old fool! one cannot but pity him, when wretched, friendless, and miserable as he was, we find him, still graceful, in a poor cafe near the Place Royale, taking his cup of coffee, and when asked for the amount of his bill, answering very vaguely, ’Oui, Madame, a la pleine lune, a la pleine lune.’

The drivellings of old age are no fit subject for ridicule, yet in the case of a man who had sneered so freely at his fellow-creatures, they may afford a useful lesson.  One of his fancies was to give imaginary parties, when his tallow dips were all set alight and his servant announced with proper decorum, ‘The Duchess of Devonshire,’ ’Lord Alvanley, ‘Mr. Sheridan,’ or whom not.  The poor old idiot received the imaginary visitors with the old bow, and talked to them in the old strain, till his servant announced their imaginary carriages, and he was put drivelling to bed.  At last the idiocy became mania.  He burnt his books, his relics, his tokens.  He ate enormously, and the man who had looked upon beer as the ne plus ultra of vulgarity, was glad to imagine it champagne.  Let us not follow the poor maniac through his wanderings.  Rather let us throw a veil over all his drivelling wretchedness, and find him at his last gasp, when coat and collar, hat and brim, were all forgotten, when the man who had worn three shirts a day was content to change his linen once a month.  What a lesson, what a warning!  If Brummell had come to this pass in England, it is hard to say how and where he would have died.  He was now utterly penniless, and had no prospect of receiving any remittances.  It was determined to remove him to the Hospice du Bon Sauveur, a Maison de Charite, where he would be well cared for at no expense.  The mania of the poor creature took, as ever, the turn of external preparation.  When the landlord of his inn entered to try and induce him to go, he found him with his wig on his knee, his shaving apparatus by his side, and the quondam beau deeply interested in lathering the peruke as a preliminary to shearing it.  He resisted every proposal to move, and was carried down stairs, kicking and shrieking.  Once lodged in the Hospice, he was treated by the soeurs de charite with the greatest kindness and consideration.  An attempt was made to recall him to a sense of his future peril, that he might at least die in a more religious mood than he had lived; but in vain.  It is not for us, erring and sinful as we are, to judge any fellow-creature; but perhaps poor Brummell was the last man to whom religion had a meaning.  His heart was good; his sins were more those of vanity than those of hate; it may be that they are regarded mercifully where the fund of mercy is unbounded.  God grant that they may be so; or who of us would escape?  None but fiends will triumph over the death of any man in sin.  Men are not fiends; they must and will always feel for their fellow-men, let them die as they will.  No doubt Brummell was