But alas! he is gone, and the city can tell
     How in years and in glory lamented he fell. 
     Him mourn’d all the Dryads on Claverton’s mount;
     Him Avon deplor’d, him the nymph of the fount,
     The crystalline streams. 
     Then perish his picture—­his statue decay—­
     A tribute more lasting the Muses shall pay. 
     If true, what philosophers all will assure us,
     Who dissent from the doctrine of great Epicurus,
     That the spirit’s immortal (as poets allow): 
     In reward of his labours, his virtue and pains,
     He is footing it now in the Elysian plains,
     Indulged, as a token of Proserpine’s favour,
     To preside at her balls in a cream-colour’d beaver. 
     Then peace to his ashes—­our grief be supprest,
     Since we find such a phoenix has sprung from his nest;
     Kind heaven has sent us another professor,
     Who follows the steps of his great predecessor.’

The end of the Bath Beau was somewhat less tragical than that of his London successor—­Brummell.  Nash, in his old age and poverty, hung about the clubs and supper-tables, button-holed youngsters, who thought him a bore, spun his long yarns, and tried to insist on obsolete fashions, when near the end of his life’s century.

The clergy took more care of him than the youngsters.  They heard that Nash was an octogenarian, and likely to die in his sins, and resolved to do their best to shrive him.  Worthy and well-meaning men accordingly wrote him long letters, in which there was a deal of warning, and there was nothing which Nash dreaded so much.  As long as there was immediate fear of death, he was pious and humble; the moment the fear had passed, he was jovial and indifferent again.  His especial delight, to the last, seems to have been swearing against the doctors, whom he treated like the individual in Anstey’s ‘Bath Guide,’ shying their medicines out of window upon their own heads.  But the wary old Beckoner called him in, in due time, with his broken, empty-chested voice; and Nash was forced to obey.  Death claimed him—­and much good it got of him—­in 1761, at the age of eighty-seven:  there are few beaux who lived so long.

Thus ended a life, of which the moral lay, so to speak, out of it.  The worthies of Bath were true to the worship of Folly, whom Anstey so well, though indelicately, describes as there conceiving Fashion; and though Nash, old, slovenly, disrespected, had long ceased to be either beau or monarch, treated his huge unlovely corpse with the honour due to the great—­or little.  His funeral was as glorious as that of any hero, and far more showy, though much less solemn, than the burial of Sir John Moore.  Perhaps for a bit of prose flummery, by way of contrast to Wolfe’s lines on the latter event, there is little to equal the account in a contemporary paper:—­’Sorrow sate upon every face, and even children lisped that their sovereign was no more.  The awfulness of the solemnity made the deepest impression on the minds of the distressed inhabitants.  The peasant discontinued his toil, the ox rested from the plough, all nature seemed to sympathise with their loss, and the muffled bells rung a peal of bob-major.’