n made no small stir by his appearance among
legislators and conquerors. After a variety of adventures, in which he
was often on the borders of crime, he pawned the linen taken from his
lodging, and was sentenced to transportation. In Newgate he was employed
as a dispenser of medicine. After four years detention he was released;
but was retaken, having neglected to quit Great Britain, and transported
for life. Such is the account he gave of his imprisonment. The penalty
might have been commuted; but he undertook to write on various subjects,
and created some trouble; he was therefore forwarded to this colony.
Here he was chiefly employed as a constable; detected many crimes, and
brought several to the scaffold. A woman, who had assisted him in
discovering certain offenders, became his wife; and he was often seen
fleeing from her fury through the streets. He, however, survived her,
and at length closed his singular career in the colonial hospital.

Jorgenson made great pretensions to literature. He wrote a treatise on
religion, and another on the treaty of Tilsit: in this country he
published a pamphlet on the funded system, and a narrative of his life
by himself. With a knowledge of the writer, it is amusing to read the
grave strictures of the London critics, who complained that he bounded
with amazing rapidity from one subject to another, without leaving a
trace of his track: now among the stars--then on a steam engine chasing
infidelity--or pelting atheism with meteoric stones.[148]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 148: Of the fitness of Jorgenson to discuss theological
questions, the reader may judge from the following passage taken from
his preface:--"No religion on earth, except the Christian, establishes
the link of the chain which must necessarily exist between the creator
and intelligent creature. After consulting history, chronology, the laws
of mechanism and the laws of nature, as unfolded by observation and
experience, he discovered that events must have happened nearly at the
time mentioned, and precisely after the manner described. At length his
mind was satisfied, that God had made our yoke easy and our burden
light."--_Religion of Christ the Religion of Nature._ Written in the
condemned cells of Newgate, by Jorgen Jorgenson, late governor of
Iceland. Capes, London, 1827.]

SECTION IV.

The retirement of Lord Bathurst, and accession of Lord Goderich, gave
some hope of a change in the form, if not the ag