APPENDIX A 485 



neither interest in London, where he had political information to 

 sell, nor the quiet of a visit to Dr. Hooker at Halesworth, availed 

 to cure him. Time after time he gambled away his all. His debts 

 brought him back to prison in the Fleet ; and when the Foreign 

 Office paid these off, and supplied him with funds for a secret mission 

 on the Continent, he gambled away these also. Boldness, how- 

 ever, never failed him. By a piece of bluff he secured a free passage 

 to Ostend, and once on the Continent his letters of credit became 

 available. 



His adventures in Germany, Poland, and France were kaleido- 

 scopic. As occasion demanded, he employed the methods of Borrow 

 or of the hero of Koepenick. He witnessed Waterloo and entered 

 Paris after the Allies. At one time he ruffled it in the capital with 

 the best ; at another he was stripped by the gamblers, and sneaked 

 away on foot for new adventures. He was rehabilitated by a Scotch 

 watchmaker in whose shop he had noted a chronometer by Jorgensen 

 the elder. He was introduced to Grand Dukes and to a greater 

 than these, Goethe. But although he did not fulfil his mission as 

 planned out, he brought back enough information to earn reward 

 from the Foreign Office on his return. 



Again he broke his excellent resolve to make good use of his 

 money and emigrate to South America. Three years, from 1817 

 to 1820, he spent in gambling and dissipation. At the end of 

 this a third spell of prison awaited him. He was charged with 

 ' converting ' his landlord's furniture, and sentenced to seven years' 

 transportation. But thanks to his influential friends, he was tem- 

 porarily detained in England and was employed as an assistant in 

 the hospital of Newgate prison, obtaining medical knowledge that 

 was to stand him in good stead afterwards. Nor did he only attend 

 to the bodies of the convicts ; he used to preach Sunday sermons 

 to his fellow prisoners. At the end of twenty months, however, it 

 was found that the offence for which he had been condemned had 

 been committed by his fellow-lodger, and he was set free on condition 

 of leaving the country within a month. 



It was a fatal delay, for he was within reach of temptation. 

 He succumbed, gambled away all he possessed, outstayed his allotted 

 month, and on his belated way to the docks, was betrayed by an 

 old Newgate acquaintance for the sake of the reward, and for his 

 default was formally condemned to death, a sentence commuted 

 to transportation for life. 



He managed to be reappointed to his old post in Newgate hospital, 

 and stayed there three years before the sentence was carried out in 

 1825. On board the convict ship he was made dispenser of the 

 hospital, and on the death of the surgeon a stalwart of the calomel 

 school took entire charge of the sick as far as Capetown, with the 



