"For the last fifteen years," he said, "my happiness has been the constant study of the most excellent of wives: a woman in whom a strong understanding, the noblest and most elevated sentiments, and the most courageous virtue, are united to the warmest affection, and to the utmost delicacy of mind and heart; and all these intellectual perfections are graced by the most splendid beauty that human eyes ever beheld." [2017] Romilly's affection and admiration for this noble woman endured to the end; and when she died, the shock proved greater than his sensitive nature could bear.
Sleep left his eyelids, his mind became unhinged, and three days after her death the sad event occurred which brought his own valued life to a close.

[2018] Sir Francis Burdett, to whom Romilly had been often politically opposed, fell into such a state of profound melancholy on the death of his wife, that he persistently refused nourishment of any kind, and died before the removal of her remains from the house; and husband and wife were laid side by side in the same grave.
It was grief for the loss of his wife that sent Sir Thomas Graham into the army at the age of forty-three.

Every one knows the picture of the newly-wedded pair by Gainsborough--one of the most exquisite of that painter's works.

They lived happily together for eighteen years, and then she died, leaving him inconsolable.

To forget his sorrow--and, as some thought, to get rid of the weariness of his life without her--Graham joined Lord Hood as a volunteer, and distinguished himself by the recklessness of his bravery at the siege of Toulon.