PRESENTIMENTS OF DEATH

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 30, 6 February 1939, Page 17

PRESENTIMENTS OF DEATH

I Asked, in his thirty -sixth year, to write a requiem, Mozart sadly replied, "It will be my own then;" and he died as goon as he had finished it, "IKd I not tell you truly," he said, musing over the score as he lay dying, "that it was for myself that I composed this deathchant?" FlechJer, the great French divine, dreamt that be was to die, and ordered his tomb. "Begin your work at 'once," was his final instruction to the sculptor, "for there ia no time to loaej" and no sooner was the house of death finished than ite intending tenant entered upon possession. "What is to foe the subject of your next design ?" asked a merry party iof friends of Hogarth. "The end of all thing*," was the reply. "In that case," said one, jokingly, "there will be an epd of the artist." "There will," rejoined Hogarth, with a depth of solemnity that was strange in him. He set about the plate in hot haate, broke up his tools when he had finished, entitled the print "Finis," and a short time after its publication lay stretched in death. "Poor Weston!" exclaimed Foote, as he stood dejectedly contemplating the portrait of a brother actor recently dead, "poor Weston! Soon others shall say, Poor Foote!'" In a tew dfeya he wm fownc to Jria tmrkd.