down his food, in order to get back quickly to his absorbing work.
The study had become a monomania with him.

I do not think there is a more pathetic story in the history of
literature than that which I have to tell of the last few weeks of
Burton's life. You are to see the old man, always ailing, sometimes
in acute pain--working twenty-five hours a day, as it were--in order
to get completed a work by which he supposed he was to live for
ever. In the same room sits the wife who dearly loves him, and whom
he dearly loves and trusts. A few days pass. He is gone.
She burns, page by page, the work at which he had toiled so long and
so patiently. And here comes the pathos of it--she was, in the
circumstances, justified in so doing. As regards Lady Burton and
the Stisteds, it was natural, perhaps, that between a staunch
Protestant family such as the Stisteds, and an uncompromising
Catholic like Lady Burton there should have been friction; but both
Lady Burton and Miss Stisted are dead. Each made, during Lady
Burton's lifetime, an honest attempt to think well of the other;
each wrote to the other many sweet, sincere, and womanly letters;
but success did not follow. Death, however, is a very loving
mother. She gently hushes her little ones to sleep; and, as they
drop off, the red spot on the cheek gradually fades away, and even
the tears on the pillow soon dry.

Although Miss Stisted's book has been a help to me I cannot endorse
her opinion that Burton's recall from Damascus was the result of
Lady Burton's indiscretions. Her books give some very interesting
reminiscences of Sir Richard's childhood and early manhood,[FN#15]
but practically it finishes with the Damascus episode. Her innocent
remarks on The Scented Garden must have made the anthropological