<i>Nunc dimittis</i> Provost’s Lodge, Eton, 12 June 1936

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter deals with the last years of M. R. James, and his death. His health was failing badly in the 1930s. He was increasingly unable to walk, had serious heart trouble and may have suffered a stroke. But he found solace in reading, performing, and thinking about the works of William Shakespeare, and particularly about Hamlet and its ghosts. The chapter closes with an account of his death, his funeral, and his will. His last, fragmentary story, ‘A Vignette’, was published a few months after his death, and takes us back to his childhood in the Rectory at Great Livermere, Suffolk.</jats:p>