When Sir William lay on his deathbed, Lady Napier was at
the same time dangerously ill; but she was wheeled into his room
on a sofa, and the two took their silent farewell of each other.
The husband died first; in a few weeks the wife followed him, and
they sleep side by side in the same grave.
Many other similar truehearted wives rise up in the memory, to
recite whose praises would more than fill up our remaining space--
such as Flaxman's wife, Ann Denham, who cheered and encouraged her
husband through life in the prosecution of his art, accompanying
him to Rome, sharing in his labours and anxieties, and finally in
his triumphs, and to whom Flaxman, in the fortieth year of their
married life, dedicated his beautiful designs illustrative of
Faith, Hope, and Charity, in token of his deep and undimmed
affection;--such as Katherine Boutcher, "dark-eyed Kate," the
wife of William Blake, who believed her husband to be the first
genius on earth, worked off the impressions of his plates and
coloured them beautifully with her own hand, bore with him in all
his erratic ways, sympathised with him in his sorrows and joys for
forty-five years, and comforted him until his dying hour--his
last sketch, made in his seventy-first year, being a likeness of
himself, before making which, seeing his wife crying by his side,
he said, "Stay, Kate! just keep as you are; I will draw your
portrait, for you have ever been an angel to me;"--such again as
Lady Franklin, the true and noble woman, who never rested in her
endeavours to penetrate the secret of the Polar Sea and prosecute
the search for her long-lost husband--undaunted by failure, and
persevering in her determination with a devotion and singleness of
purpose altogether unparalleled;--or such again as the wife of
Zimmermann, whose intense melancholy she strove in vain to
assuage, sympathizing with him, listening to him, and endeavouring
to understand him--and to whom, when on her deathbed, about to
leave him for ever, she addressed the touching words, "My poor
Zimmermann! who will now understand thee?"
Wives have actively helped their husbands in other ways.
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