It would not be hard to say which of the two gifts has done the greater good. Poor Will Nutley took his 500 guineas, and had "more bottles," went a few more times to the theatres in lace and velvet and brocade, roared out at a few more drinking bouts, and was carried off by [his biographer calls it "a violent fever"] in the twenty-ninth year of his age. And possibly since Willy Nutley was Willy Nutley, and no one else, this was the best possible termination for him. That Radcliffe, the head of a grave profession, and a man of fifty-seven years of age, should have conceived an enthusiastic friendship for a youngster of half his age, is a fact that shows us one of the consequences of the tavern life of our great-grandfathers. It puts us in mind of how Fielding, ere he had a beard, burst into popularity with the haunters of coffee-houses. When roistering was in fashion, a young man had many chances which he no longer possesses. After the theatres were closed, he reeled into the hostels of the town, singing snatches with the blithe, clear voice of youth, laughing and jesting with all around, and frequently amongst that "all" he came in contact with the highest and most powerful men of the time. A boy-adventurer could display his wit and quality to statesmen and leaders of all sorts; whereas now he must wait years before he is even introduced to them, and years more ere he gets an invitation to their formal dinners, at which Barnes Newcome cuts as brilliant a figure as the best and the strongest. Throughout his life Radcliffe was a staunch and manly Jacobite. He was for "the king"; but neither loyalty nor interest could bind him to higher considerations than those of attachment to the individual he regarded as the rightful head of the realm. In 1688, when Obadiah Walker tried to wheedle him into the folly of becoming a Romanist, the attempt at perversion proved a signal failure. Nothing can be more truly manly than his manner of rejecting the wily advances of the proselytizing pervert. "The advantages you propose to me," he writes, "may be very great, for all that I know; God Almighty can do very much and so can the king; but you'll pardon me if I cease to speak like a physician for once, and, with an air of gravity, am very apprehensive that I may anger the one in being too complaisant to the other. You cannot call this pinning my faith to any man's sleeve; those that know me are too well apprized of my quite contrary tendency. As I never flattered a man myself, so 'tis my firm resolution never to be wheedled out of my real sentiments--which are, that since it has been my good fortune to be educated according to the usage of the Church of England, established by law, I shall never make myself so unhappy as to shame my teachers and instructors by departing from what I have imbibed from them."