LIFE OF MVTTON. 63 



charges on the road. An equinoctial gale having 

 sprung up, carried great part of the notes away on 

 its wings, verifying the proverb of "light come, light 

 go." It was always his custom to have a large sum 

 of money in his travelling writing-desk, but it was 

 more than usually large at this time, in consequence 

 of his havinof broken the banks of two well-known 

 London Hells on the eve of his departure from 

 London for Doncaster. Like Democritus, however, 

 Mytton laughed at everything, and always spoke of 

 this as a very good joke. I have seen him, when he 

 has been going a journey, take a lot of bank-notes 

 out of his desk, and, rolling them into a lump, throw 

 them at his servant's head, as if they had been waste 

 paper ; but his chaplain used to say, he always knew 

 what the lump contained, and how far it would carry 

 him — a fact by no means so clear to me. I picked 

 up one of these lumps some years since in the plan- 

 tations at Halston, containing ^j/., which had been 

 there some days by its appearance ; and as he never 

 had pockets in his breeches, such occurrences must 

 have been frequent. 



Perhaps there was one cause of expense incurred 

 by John Mytton that is not to be traced to any other 

 man ; but, as Charles the Fifth profanely boasted 



