'According to one of the papers,' says Coulton, vaguely, 'the cause
of death was disease of the heart.' A brief 'convulsion' is
distinctly mentioned, whence Coulton concludes that the disease was
NOT cardiac. On December 7, Mason writes to Walpole from York:
'Suppose Lord Lyttelton had recovered the breaking of his blood-
vessel!'

Was a broken blood-vessel the cause of death? or have we here, as is
probable, a mere inference of Mason's?

Coulton's account is meant to lead up to his theory of suicide.
Lord Lyttelton mentioned his apprehension of death 'somewhat
ostentatiously, we think.' According to Coulton, at 10 P.M. on
Saturday, Lord Lyttelton, looking at his watch, said: 'Should I
live two hours longer, I shall jockey the ghost.' Coulton thinks
that it would have been 'more natural' for him to await the fatal
hour of midnight 'in gay company' than to go to bed before twelve.
He finishes the tale thus: Lord Lyttelton was taking rhubarb in his
bedroom; he sent his valet for a spoon, and the man, returning,
found him 'on the point of dissolution.'

'His family maintained a guarded and perhaps judicious silence on
the subject,' yet Lord Westcote spoke of it to Dr. Johnson, and
wrote an account of it, and so did Lord Lyttelton's widow; while
Wraxall, as we shall see, says that the Dowager Lady Lyttelton
painted a picture of the 'warning' in 1780.

Harping on suicide, Coulton quotes Scott's statement in 'Letters on
Demonology:' 'Of late it has been said, and PUBLISHED, that the