Death
Fell, who had never married, died worn out, according to Wood. He was buried in the divinity chapel in the cathedral, below the seat which he had so often occupied when living, where a monument and an epitaph, now moved elsewhere, were placed to his memory. "His death," writes John Evelyn, "was an extraordinary losse to the poore church at this time". With all his faults Fell was a great man, "the greatest governor," according to Speaker Onslow, "that has ever been since his time in either of the universities," and of his own college, to which he left several exhibitions for the maintenance of poor scholars, he was a second founder.
A sum of money was left by John Cross to perpetuate Fell's memory by an annual speech in his praise, but the Felii laudes were discontinued in 1866. There are two interesting pictures of Fell at Christ Church, one where he is represented with his two friends Allestree and Dolben, and another by Anthony van Dyck. The statue placed on the northeast angle of the Great Quadrangle bears no likeness to the bishop, who is described by Hearne as a "thin grave man."
Read more about this topic: John Fell (bishop)
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude
Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“If thee thy brittle beauty so deceives,
Know then the thing that swells thee is thy bane;
For the same beauty doth, in bloody leaves.
The sentence of thy early death contain.”
—Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–1666)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)