For thirty years his squat, stout figure was amiably familiar to all such as enjoyed the Liberties of the Jug.  For thirty years his mottled nose and the rubicundity of his cheeks were the ineffaceable ensigns of his intemperance.  Yet there was a grimy humour in his forbidding aspect.  The fusty black coat, which sat ill upon his shambling frame, was all besmirched with spilled snuff, and the lees of a thousand quart pots.  The bands of his profession were ever awry upon a tattered shirt.  His ancient wig scattered dust and powder as he went, while a single buckle of some tawdry metal gave a look of oddity to his clumsy, slipshod feet.  A caricature of a man, he ambled and chuckled and seized the easy pleasures within his reach.  There was never a summer’s day but he caught upon his brow the few faint gleams of sunlight that penetrated the gloomy yard.  Hour after hour he would sit, his short fingers hardly linked across his belly, drinking his cup of ale, and puffing at a half-extinguished tobacco-pipe.  Meanwhile he would reflect upon those triumphs of oratory which were his supreme delight.  If it fell on a Monday that he took the air, a smile of satisfaction lit up his fat, loose features, for still he pondered the effect of yesterday’s masterpiece.  On Saturday the glad expectancy of to-morrow lent him a certain joyous dignity.  At other times his eye lacked lustre, his gesture buoyancy, unless indeed he were called upon to follow the cart to Tyburn, or to compose the Last Dying Speech of some notorious malefactor.

Preaching was the master passion of his life.  It was the pulpit that reconciled him to exile within a great city, and persuaded him to the enjoyment of roguish company.  Those there were who deemed his career unfortunate; but a sense of fitness might have checked their pity, and it was only in his hours of maudlin confidence that the Reverend Thomas confessed to disappointment.  Born of respectable parents in the County of Cambridgeshire, he nurtured his youth upon the exploits of James Hind and the Golden Farmer.  His boyish pleasure was to lie in the ditch, which bounded his father’s orchard, studying that now forgotten masterpiece, ‘There’s no Jest like a True Jest.’  Then it was that he felt ‘immortal longings in his blood.’  He would take to the road, so he swore, and hold up his enemies like a gentleman.  Once, indeed, he was surprised by the clergyman of the parish in act to escape from the rectory with two volumes of sermons and a silver flagon.  The divine was minded to speak seriously to him concerning the dreadful sin of robbery, and having strengthened him with texts and good counsel, to send him forth unpunished.  ‘Thieving and covetousness,’ said the parson, ’must inevitably bring you to the gallows.  If you would die in your bed, repent you of your evildoing, and rob no more.’  The exhortation was not lost upon Pureney, who, chastened in spirit, straightly prevailed upon his father to enter him a pensioner at Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge, that at the proper time he might take orders.