ROBERT POCOCK. 227 



hibiting ail the symptoms of early financial dissolution 

 and catastrophe. [This work was written by a visitor.] 



The mischief culminated this burden of impe- 

 cuniosity this terrible scourge of poverty, to which 

 unworldly men knowing little of that which is sordid 

 are ever so prone to fall victims this mischief with 

 which Pocock, like others of his class, knew no mode 

 of grappling, was advancing with sure and steady steps, 

 and was now about finally to engulph him. It came at 

 last, when his furniture and household effects were taken 

 in execution. This he would have borne, and borne 

 perhaps with equanimity; but his museum and his 

 deeply-prized and laboriously-formed collections 

 his fossils, his butterflies were sold and dispersed 

 (see p. 243); and he himself, alas! became houseless 

 and a wanderer. 



Fortunately, as his Journal has shown (p. 203), he had 

 lately established his son George as a printer at the 

 neighbouring town of Dartford, and there he himself 

 found a resting-place for the soles of his feet, cast out 

 of his native town, impoverished and ruined ! Happy 

 privilege, which gave to the son to be a refuge to his 

 broken-down father ! 



But this refugee was not a man to surrender his at- 

 tachment to the pursuits of his life, or give up the 

 practice of them by self-prostration. On the contrary, 

 he began to repay his new neighbours by sedulously 

 setting to work to complete a singularly full, complete, 

 and exhaustive history of that town and its adjacent 

 parish of Wilmington (forming together a separate 

 hundred, one by no means unentitled to the attention 

 of the antiquarian and the topographer), and he followed 

 up this labour of love with so hearty a good- will that 



Q 2 



