A friend asked me to answer this question: What is the name of the person Oscar Wilde visited on their death bed?, using the article: Burges died, aged 53, in his Red Bed at the Tower House, at 11.45 p.m. on Wednesday 20 April 1881. While on a tour of works at Cardiff, he caught a chill and returned to London, half-paralysed, where he lay dying for some three weeks. Among his last visitors were Oscar Wilde and James Whistler. He was buried in the tomb he designed for his mother at West Norwood, London. On his death, John Starling Chapple, Burges's office manager and close associate for more than twenty years, wrote "a constant relationship ... with one of the brightest ornaments of the profession has rendered the parting most severe. Thank God his work will live and ... be the admiration of future students. I have hardly got to realize my lonely position yet. He was almost all the world to me." Lady Bute, wife of his greatest patron, wrote, "Dear Burges, ugly Burges, who designed such lovely things – what a duck."
In Saint Fin Barre's, together with memorials to his mother and sister, there is a memorial plaque to Burges, designed by him, and erected by his father. It shows the King of Heaven presiding over the four apostles, who hold open the Word of God. Under the inscription "Architect of this cathedral" is a simple shield and a small, worn, plaque with a mosaic surround, bearing Burges's entwined initials and name. Legal complications obstructed Burges's wish to be buried in the cathedral he had built. Burges's own words on Saint Fin Barre's, in his letter of January 1877 to the Bishop of Cork, sum up his career, "Fifty years hence, the whole affair will be on its trial and, the elements of time and cost being forgotten, the result only will be looked at. The great questions will then be, first, is this work beautiful and, secondly, have those to whom it was entrusted, done it with all their heart and all their ability.", what would be the answer ?



Burges