efflavit

Updated: May 14, 2025

It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with the brief record, "Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773," but it is imaginable with what wrath he would have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he would have had it out with those "friends and fellow-countrymen" who had the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.

William Dean Howells - Roman Holidays, and Others