What a sad thing it is to see a man close a grand career with a plagiarism in his mouth.  Napoleon’s last words were:  “Tete d’armee.”  (Head of the army.) Neither of those remarks amounts to anything as “last words,” and reflect little credit upon the utterers.

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath.  He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them.  He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spirit at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.  No—­a man is apt to be too much fagged and exhausted, both in body and mind, at such a time, to be reliable; and maybe the very thing he wants to say, he cannot think of to save him; and besides there are his weeping friends bothering around; and worse than all as likely as not he may have to deliver his last gasp before he is expecting to.  A man cannot always expect to think of a natty thing to say under such circumstances, and so it is pure egotistic ostentation to put it off.  There is hardly a case on record where a man came to his last moment unprepared and said a good thing hardly a case where a man trusted to that last moment and did not make a solemn botch of it and go out of the world feeling absurd.

Now there was Daniel Webster.  Nobody could tell him anything.  He was not afraid.  He could do something neat when the time came.  And how did it turn out?  Why, his will had to be fixed over; and then all the relations came; and first one thing and then another interfered, till at last he only had a chance to say, “I still live,” and up he went.

Of course he didn’t still live, because he died—­and so he might as well have kept his last words to himself as to have gone and made such a failure of it as that.  A week before that fifteen minutes of calm reflection would have enabled that man to contrive some last words that would have been a credit to himself and a comfort to his family for generations to come.

And there was John Quincy Adams.  Relying on his splendid abilities and his coolness in emergencies, he trusted to a happy hit at the last moment to carry him through, and what was the result?  Death smote him in the House of Representatives, and he observed, casually, “This is the last of earth.”  The last of earth!  Why “the last of earth” when there was so much more left?  If he had said it was the last rose of summer or the last run of shad, it would have had as much point in it.  What he meant to say was, “Adam was the first and Adams is the last of earth,” but he put it off a trifle too long, and so he had to go with that unmeaning observation on his lips.