schools, the bishop and ladies also maintain. I said you never did pretend that your System would supersede the necessity of able masters, and carry on the whole matter mechanically, which they all seemed to conceive had been advanced."

Perhaps the most important duty that Dr Bell performed at Westminster Abbey was to read the funeral service over the body of Mrs Garrick. She was buried in her husband's grave; and when it was opened, a copy of Shakespeare's plays was found resting on his coffin.

Dr Bell was, at no time of his life, a clear or methodical writer. He said the same thing-he had only one or two ideas altogether in his head-over and over again in different ways, in long lumbering sentences, and with a ponderosity of manner that repelled and disenchanted. For the last twenty years his anxiety about what he called his " style" had been growing upon him to such a degree, that in 1823 it had become a disease. Mr Davies, his amanuensis, was the chief victim of this habit of anxiety. The too anxious Doctor rendered his manuscripts almost totally illegible by interlineations, erasures, and corrections; the proofs of his books were as bad; the revises were very little better. He sat up himself at these corrections till one or two o'clock in the morning, and when the time for getting up came, his mind was ready with a fresh batch of alterations. These altered and corrected manuscripts Mr Davies had to copy out on large paper in a fair hand; and he had to be ready to do the same for the alterations of the next morning. Thus he seldom got more than two or three hours' sleep, and sometimes none at

all. He was kept up the whole night. But even this was not enough. The Doctor used to send the proof-sheets of his works to his friends Lord Kenyon, Mr and Mrs Johnson, Mr Southey, Sir James Langham, and others; and then, when they came full of corrections, he simply tossed them aside. The work he was now engaged in was his 'Manual of Instructions' for conducting schools on the Madras System; and the work upon it was so hard that Mr Davies at length broke utterly down. The book appeared in 1823.

But Dr Bell must go on writing and saying the same thing over and over again and again. He accordingly set to work on an abridgment of this Manual. He went on with it—it was to be only a little book of forty-eight pages-year after year. In 1827 he writes to Mr Southey: "Advanced years, growing infirmities, and decay of mind and memory, together with the difficulty of compressing within forty-eight pages what was before a hundred and forty-eight, and leaving nothing out, are the causes to which I ascribe my slow progress, in the course of which I often turned my eyes towards you; but with so small a matter as a sixpenny or shilling tract for common use, I could not bring myself to break in on your time, occupied as I always know it to be."

85

CHAPTER XIV.

THE LAST DAYS.

In the end of the year 1830, Dr Bell had fixed his residence at Cheltenham, which he never again quitted. He was now seventy-seven years of age; his voice and throat had become affected, and he was unable to articulate without considerable difficulty. He had also great difficulty in swallowing; and his breathing was hard and much impeded, especially in the morning. What the doctors feared was ossification of the upper part of the windpipe.

He was now becoming very anxious about his works -both the present and the posthumous editions; and, among other plans, he formed one of a complete edition of all he had written and published, to be edited conjointly by Mr Southey and Mr Wordsworth. Mrs Wordsworth went down to Cheltenham to see him about this project; but Dr Bell was both ill and irritable-full of anxiety about the disposal of his property, and the future fate of his "ideas"-and Mrs Wordsworth cannot be said to have enjoyed her visit. Nothing, in any case, came of the proposal.

His money, in fact, had become a terrible burden to

him. He had laboured-both by saving and by enterprise -to make money; and his success had been very remarkable. His chief anxiety now was that the money that was going to be left behind him should go to the promotion and immortalisation of his own educational ideas. One of his chief occupations and amusements in his latter days had been the making, unmaking, and remaking of wills; and a large part of Mr Davies's work had consisted of copying and recopying these wills, and the endless interlineations upon them. Now, however, as things began to look serious, he thought it was time to employ a lawyer. Nay, more, a great fear and haste seized upon him; and "make all despatch-no time must be lost," became the everlasting burden — the monotonous refrain at the close of all his messages and letters.

On the 11th of May 1831, without consulting any person whatever, he gave orders for £120,000 to be transferred to the care of four gentlemen in St Andrews, who were to act as trustees.

His sister, Miss Bell, had expressed a strong wish to go down to Cheltenham and pay a visit to her brother; and with some reluctance he gave his consent to this, and forwarded to her an invitation. No sooner had he given this consent, than he wrote her another letter to recall it. But she had set off before this second letter came; and, on her arrival at Cheltenham, was received with warm affection by her brother. He made her a present of his cottage and grounds, of furniture, goods, and chattels, and also of "the carpet, and the covering of the coronation-chair which fell to me at the coronation

of King George the Fourth." Most unfortunately, however, Miss Bell had taken it into her head that her brother was not in a fit state to make a will, or to manage his own affairs; and his odd ways, his sudden bursts of irritability, and his apparently causeless anxiety, seemed to give strength to this opinion. Upon these phenomena Miss Bell meditated much, until at length she went so far as to say to other persons in the course of conversation, that "he was not in his right mind." Dr Bell had always been a shrewd man; and a few strange signs very soon put him upon the track of her intentions. He was unable to speak; but he silently placed a paper in her hands, requesting her to leave the house immediately, and offering her a choice of residence at St Andrews, at London, or at Malvern.

In his last will, dated the 13th of August 1831, he named as trustees of the whole of his property the Earl of Leven and Melville, Walter Cook, Esquire, Writer to H.M. Signet, Lord Kenyon, the Lord Justice - Clerk of Scotland, and Bishop Walker of Edinburgh. The trustees of the money intended for St Andrews were now to be the subject of unceasing interpellations. He wrote to them "to engage at any expense an agent to inform him, day by day, what was going forward." "My solicitude distresses me much. Excuse my anxiety. There is danger in the delay of a day." These trustees were to erect a building in harmony with the style of Blackfriars Chapel-one of the most beautiful remains in a city full of ecclesiastical fragments-to appoint four teachers, and also a rector of the Institution. A paper, containing his own suggestions, was drawn up