inspiration of luck he checked a mutiny, holding the quarter-deck against a mob of ruffians with no weapon but a marline-spike.  And hereafter, as he tells you in his ‘Voyage to New South Wales,’ he was accorded the fullest liberty to come or go.  He visited many a foreign port with the officers of the ship; he packed a hundred note-books with trite and superfluous observations; he posed, in brief, as the captain of the ship without responsibility.  Arrived at Port Jackson, he was acclaimed a hero, and received with obsequious solicitude by the Governor, who promised that his ’future situation should be such as would render his banishment from England as little irksome as possible.’  Forthwith he was appointed high constable of Paramatta, and, like Vautrin, who might have taken the youthful Barrington for another Rastignac, he ended his days the honourable custodian of less fortunate convicts.  Or, as a broadside ballad has it,

          He left old Drury’s flash purlieus,
               To turn at last a copper.

Never did he revert to his ancient practice.  If in his youth he had lived the double-life with an effrontery and elegance which Brodie himself never attained, henceforth his career was single in its innocence.  He became a prig in the less harmful and more offensive sense.  After the orthodox fashion he endeared himself to all who knew him, and ruled Paramatta with an equable severity.  Having cultivated the humanities for the base purposes of his trade, he now devoted himself to literature with an energy of dulness, becoming, as it were, a liberal education personified.  His earlier efforts had been in verse, and you wonder that no enterprising publisher had ventured on a limited edition.  Time was he composed an ode to Light, and once recovering from a fever contracted at Ballyshannon, he addressed a few burning lines to Hygeia: 

     Hygeia! thou whose eyes display
     The lustre of meridian day;

and so on for endless couplets.  Then, had he not celebrated in immortal verse his love for Miss Egerton, untimely drowned in the waters of the Boyne?  But now, as became the Constable of Paramatta, he chose the sterner medium, and followed up his ‘Voyage to New South Wales’ with several exceeding trite and valuable histories.

His most ambitious work was dedicated in periods of unctuous piety to his Majesty King George III., and the book’s first sentence is characteristic of his method and sensibility:  ’In contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.’  Would you read further?  Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise.  His first masterpiece was translated into French, anno vi., and the translator apologises that war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography.  Was ever thief treated with so grave a consideration?