After Hayward’s death in 1884, his own habits began to change.  He still dined at the Athenaeum “corner,” but increasing deafness began to make society irksome, and, his solitary meal ended, he spent his evenings reading in the Library.  By-and-by that too became impossible.  His voice grew weak, throat and tongue were threatened with disease.  In 1888 he went to Brighton with a nurse, returned to rooms on Richmond Hill, then to Bayswater Terrace.  An operation was performed and he seemed to recover, but relapsed.  Old friends tended him:  Madame Novikoff, Mr. Froude and Mr. Lecky, Madame de Quaire and Mrs. Brookfield, Lord Mexborough his ancient fellow-traveller, Mrs. Craven, Sir William and Lady Gregory, with a few more, cheered him by their visits so long as he was able to bear them; and his brother and sister, Dr. and Mrs. Hamilton Kinglake, were with him at the end.  Patient to the last, kind and gentle to all about him, he passed away quietly on New Year’s Day, 1891: 

“being merry-hearted, Shook hands with flesh and blood, and so departed.”

His remains were cremated at Woking, after a special service at Christchurch, Lancaster Gate, attended by Dr. and Mrs. Kinglake with their son Captain Kinglake, the Duke of Bedford, Mr. and Mrs. Lecky, Mrs. W. H. Brookfield and her son Charles.

No good portrait of him has been published.  That prefixed to Blackwood’s “Eothen” of 1896 was furnished by Dr. Kinglake, who, however, looked upon it as unsatisfactory.  The “Not an M.P.” of “Vanity Fair,” 1872, is a grotesque caricature.  The photograph here reproduced (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving hers in return, but pronouncing the transaction “an exchange between the personified months of May and November.”  The face gives expression to the shy aloofness which, amongst strangers, was characteristic of him through life.  He had even a horror of hearing his name pealed out by servants, and came early to parties that the proclamation might be achieved before as few auditors as possible.  Visiting the newly married husband of his friend Adelaide Kemble, and being the first guest to arrive, he encountered in Mr. Sartoris a host as contentedly undemonstrative as himself.  Bows passed, a seat by the fire was indicated, he sat down, and the pair contemplated one another for ten minutes in absolute silence, till the lady of the house came in, like the prince in “The Sleeping Beauty,” though not by the same process, to break the charm.  He gave up calling at a house where he was warmly appreciated, because father, mother, daughter, bombarded him with questions.  “I never came away without feeling sure that I had in some way perjured myself.”