3ohn /Ifti^tton 123 



life if it was to be passed on ^6000 a year ! ' And what 

 object is to be gained by lifting the veil to disclose the 

 domestic scandals in the life of a man, who, during his 

 last twelve years, was never sober? His daily quantum 

 of port wine was six bottles, but, even in spite of this 

 excess, he would probably have lived far longer than he 

 did, had he not, in an evil hour, discarded port for 

 brandy. Even his adamantine constitution, 'perhaps 

 the hardiest ever bestowed upon man,' as ' Nimrod ' says, 

 was not proof against that. He went from bad to worse, 

 till in the year 1830 the world heard without surprise 

 that ' it was all up with Jack Mytton.' Everything that 

 could be sold was sold ; upwards of ;^8o,ooo worth of the 

 grand old timber of Halston Park went to pay his debts, 

 and he retired to Calais with just a small pittance, 

 sufficient to keep body and soul together. There he 

 completed the wreck of his magnificent physique by 

 drinking brandy till he really became a raving lunatic. 

 On partially recovering his senses he came over to 

 England, where he was promptly arrested and thrown 

 into the King's Bench Prison, beyond the gates of which 

 he was destined never to pass alive. For there, in 

 misery and squalor, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, 

 died the descendant of twenty generations of honourable 

 and opulent Shropshire gentlemen. 



The story of his sad end moved the pity of his fellow- 

 shiresmen, and when his body was laid in the ancestral 

 vault, three thousand persons, of all ranks and conditions, 

 assembled to pay their last tribute to the memory of 

 one in whom much good was mixed with much evil. 



In concluding his somewhat mawkish biography of his 

 friend John Mytton, ' Nimrod ' used these words : ' It is 

 consoling to think that estates, amounting to ^^"4500 a 



