years before, which, to use his own phrase, was at least a circonstance attenuante.  The permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner.  There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came across him by chance.  They had been going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly caught sight of Wainewright.  He met them with a defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was ’horrified to recognise a man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he had dined.’

Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of fashionable lounge.  Many men of letters went down to visit their old literary comrade.  But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom Charles Lamb admired.  He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied:  ’Sir, you City men enter on your speculations, and take the chances of them.  Some of your speculations succeed, some fail.  Mine happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded.  That is the only difference, sir, between my visitor and me.  But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last.  I have been determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman.  I have always done so.  I do so still.  It is the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning’s turn of sweeping it out.  I occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!’ When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, ’Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’—­Pen, Pencil and Poison.

WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN

His love of art, however, never deserted him.  At Hobart Town he started a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm.  Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in which he tried to make away with people who had offended him.  But his hand seems to have lost its cunning.  Both of his attempts were complete failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave.  In it he speaks of himself as being ’tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and realisation,