Mr Foster, however, the rescuer from the fish-basket, was of another mind.  He went in chase of the fugitive, ran him to earth, and brought him again triumphantly home, submissive but unrepentant.  It was quite clear that the boy would never settle down to the humdrum life of home and school, and, with his father’s permission, Mr Foster took the restless youth for a long visit to the West Indies, where it seemed that at last he was cured of his passion for straying.  A few years later we find him back in England, a model of stability, a student and a scholar, who, in 1747, blossomed into a knight of the shire for the County of Huntingdon.  The rolling-stone had come to rest at last, and had actually developed into a pillar of the State!

But this eminently respectable chapter in Montagu’s chequered life was destined to be a short one.  He soon found himself so uncomfortably deep in debt that he vanished again—­this time to escape from his creditors.  He turned up smiling in Paris, where the sedate legislator blossomed into the gambler and roue, dividing his time between the seductive poles of the gaming-table and fair women.

His course of dissipation, however, received a sudden and severe check one Sunday morning in the autumn of 1751, when he was rudely disturbed by the entry of a posse of officials into his room, armed with a warrant for his imprisonment.

“On Sunday, the 31st of October 1751,” Mr Montagu records, “when it was near one in the morning, as I was undressed and going to bed, I heard a person enter my room; and upon turning round and seeing a man I did not know, I asked him calmly what he wanted?  His answer was that I must put on my clothes. I began to expostulate upon the motive of his apparition, when a commissary instantly entered the room with a pretty numerous attendance, and told me with great gravity that he was come, by virtue of a warrant for my imprisonment, to carry me to the Grand Chatelet.  I requested him again and again to inform me of the crime laid to my charge; but all his answer was, that I must follow him.  I begged him to give me leave to write to Lord Albemarle, the English Ambassador, promising to obey the warrant if his Excellency was not pleased to answer for my forthcoming.  But the Commissary refused me the use of pen and ink, though he consented that I should send a verbal message to his Excellency, telling me at the same time that he would not wait the return of the messenger, because his orders were to carry me instantly to prison.  As resistance under such circumstances must have been unavailable, and might have been blameable, I obeyed the warrant by following the Commissary, after ordering one of my domestics to inform my Lord Albemarle of the treatment I underwent.

“I was carried to the Chatelet, where the jailors, hardened by their profession, and brutal for their profit, fastened upon me as upon one of those guilty objects whom they