excellent woman, who had devoted herself since his return to dull the
edge of political asperity, and to control the capricious temper of her
mother, Marlborough was likewise deprived. After bearing with Christian
fortitude a painful and lingering illness, she was attacked, in the
beginning of April, 1716, with a pleurisy, against which her enfeebled
constitution proved unable to oppose itself, and on the 15th she died,
at the early age of twenty-eight. Like Rachel weeping for her children,
Marlborough refused to be comforted. He withdrew to the retirement of
Holywell, that he might indulge his sorrow unseen; and there became
first afflicted by that melancholy distemper, under which first his mind
and eventually his body sunk.

"To what proximate cause this attack is to be attributed,--whether to
excess of sorrow, or, which is more probable, to an accumulation of
predisposing occurrences,--we possess no means of ascertaining; but on
the 28th of May he was smitten with paralysis, and became deprived on
the instant both of sense and of speech. The best medical aid being at
hand, he was speedily relieved from the fit, and under the skilful
management of Sir Samuel Garth, gradually regained his strength; but
from the usual effects of such a stroke he never wholly recovered,
neither his articulation nor his memory being restored to their original
tone. He was able to proceed, it is true, so early as the 7th of July,
to Bath, where he drank the waters with benefit, and he returned in a
certain degree into society, resuming with apparent ease the ordinary
course of his employment. That his faculties were not absolutely
impaired, moreover, is demonstrated by the fact, that it was
subsequently to this his first seizure that he played his part on the
trial of Lord Oxford; while his successful speculation in South Sea
stock, by which, contrary to the custom of the adventure, he realized
100,000_l_. proves that the talent of making money, at least, had not