eafter, 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 fu