John Horne Tooke - Later Years and Legacy

Later Years and Legacy

The last years of Tooke's life were spent in retirement, in a house on the west side of Wimbledon Common. The traditions of Tooke's Sunday parties lasted unimpaired up to this point, and the most pleasant pages penned by Tooke's biographer describe the politicians and the men of letters who gathered around Tooke's hospitable board. Tooke's conversational powers rivalled those of Samuel Johnson; and, if more of Tooke's sayings have not been chronicled for the benefit of posterity, the defect is due to the absence of a James Boswell. Through the liberality of Tooke's friends, Tooke's last days were freed from the pressure of poverty, and Tooke was enabled to place his illegitimate son in a position which soon brought him wealth, and to leave a competency to his two illegitimate daughters. Illness seized Tooke early in 1810, and for the next two years his sufferings were acute. He died in his house at Wimbledon, London, and was buried with his mother at Ealing, the tomb which he had prepared in the garden attached to his house at Wimbledon was found unsuitable for the interment. An altar-tomb still stands to his memory in Ealing churchyard. A catalogue of his library was printed in 1813.

Many of Horne Tooke's sayings are preserved in The Table Talk of Samuel Rogers And S. T. Coleridge; The main facts of his life were set out by Thorold Rogers, in his Historical Gleanings, 2nd series. The Life Of Horne Tooke, by Alexander Stephens, was written by an admirer who only knew Horne Tooke as an old man. William Hamilton Reid made a compilation, noticed in the Quarterly Review, June 1812, by John William Ward.