Note 30 — Last Words of Distinguished Men and Women. (continued 3)

To some of the most distinguished of our race death has come in the strangest possible way, and so grotesquely as to subtract greatly from the dignity of the sorrow it must certainly have occasioned. Æschylus, whose seventy tragedies, to say nothing of his many satiric dramas, have given their author an immortal name, was killed by the fall of a tortoise on his bald head from the talons of an eagle high in the air above him.

There was a singular propriety in the death of Anacreon by choking at a grape stone or a dried grape. The poet whose sweetest and most enticing lines celebrate wine and love came to his death at the ripe age of eighty-five from the fruit of the vine. Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, was given by the treacherous Maenon a poisoned toothpick which soon rendered his mouth incurably gangrened, and deprived him of the power of speech. While in this miserable and helpless condition he was stretched upon the funeral pile and burned alive.

Fabius, the Roman praetor, died from the same cause that occasioned the death of Anacreon. A single goat hair in the milk he was drinking, lodged in his trachea and choked him. Chalchas, the soothsayer, outlived the time predicted for his death, which struck him as so comical that he burst into a fit of most immoderate laughter from which he died. Thus also died the famous Marquette, who was convulsed with a fatal merriment on seeing a monkey trying to pull on a pair of boots. Philomenes was seized with an equally disastrous merriment when he came suddenly upon an ass that was devouring with greediness the choice figs that had been prepared for his own desert.

Laughter killed the great Zeuxis, of whom Pliny relates the story of a trial of skill with the painter Parrhasius. The former painted a bunch of grapes that were so natural a bird endeavored to eat the fruit. Charles VIII., while gallantly conducting his queen into the tennis court, struck his head against the lintel and died soon after from the accident.

Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, was struck by a cricket ball, which caused his death. A pig occasioned the death of Louis VI., the creature ran under the monarch's horse causing it to stumble. But of all strange deaths that of Itadach is the strangest. He expired from thirst while toiling in the harvest field, because, in obedience to the rule of St. Patrick, he would not drink "a drop of anything."