When the wine was gone out. — Simply, when the brutish, selfish reveller had become sober by lapse of time.
His heart died within him. — These words are generally understood as signifying that an attack of apoplexy had seized the intemperate man. Commentators are a little divided as to the immediate cause of the stroke. (a) It was brought on by fear, hearing to what a terrible danger he had been, through his reckless, unguarded language and churlish conduct, exposed. In that drunken sleep, out of which he was then scarcely awakened, he and all his family would have perished miserably had it not been for his wife’s forethought. In his enfeebled state, feverish and excited still with the strong drink, terror and horror seized him, and the “stroke” followed. (b) A furious burst of anger at his wife’s intelligence swept over him: that she should have humiliated herself before one whom he evidently hated, like David, was to him unbearable; and the wild burst of anger acting on the ruined, drink-shattered frame completed the mischief, and the result was the stroke of apoplexy. The first is, however, the more probable.