The Priory was built by a Catholic parishioner. Romanists and Dissenters would have every chance of making way at Kew, when its living, still conjoined with Petersham, was held for ten years, from 1818, by Charles Caleb Colton, a parson who might well speak of himself as only a “finger-post” on the road to heaven. This eccentric divine was more concerned about angling in the Thames than to be a fisher of men. He did not live at either of his cures, but in shabby lodgings in Soho, going down to Kew only for necessary services, and spending the week-days after the manner of a Bohemian author, perhaps not unknown to Thackeray. At one time he carried on business, _sub rosâ_, as a wine-merchant, in cellars underneath a Methodist chapel, a possible hint for Mr. Sherrick’s dealings at Lady Whittlesea’s; but Colton had none of the Rev. Charles Honeyman’s suave humbug, while in some respects he may have sat as model for the coarser reprobate who blackmailed Philip Firmin’s father. His most unclerical pursuit was gambling, through which he got into some difficulty that packed him off to America in haste. He returned to put in an appearance at his living, which, however, seems now to have lapsed out of his incumbency. He next went to Paris, plunged head over heels into gaming, and blew out his brains in 1832. Yet this was the author of that once popular book _Lacon_, that among other edifying and sententious sentiments denounces the desperate gamester as doubly ruined: “He adds his soul to every other loss; and by the act of suicide renounces earth to forfeit heaven.” The cure of souls he had filled so unworthily passed into the hands of the Rev. R. B. Byam, who held it for forty years, in favour with all classes and especially with his chief parishioners, the royal dukes who still from time to time showed themselves in Kew Church. When Kew had been deserted by kings and courtiers, its gardens being turned into a public institution, the keepers of them grew to be important personages, of whom more has been said in the last chapter. For a time names of note are less often met with in this neighbourhood. One long link with the past was the life of Mrs. Gwyn, who died here in 1840, the year of Madame d’Arblay’s death, in whose _Diary_ this lady’s name appears. She was the widow of Colonel Gwyn, one of the royal equerries in that time of trouble which Fanny Burney passed through half a century before. She had been the beautiful Mary Horneck, “the Jessamy Bride” whom Goldsmith loved in vain; and there may be those still alive at Kew that heard her memories of Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, of the first night of _She Stoops to Conquer_, and the first fame of the _Vicar of Wakefield_.