There is a difficulty in the way of the telling of Marryat’s own life during these busy eighteen years--the not uncommon difficulty, want of information. The biography published by his family leaves much unexplained, for reasons into which it would be useless, even if one had the right, to inquire. The causes of Marryat’s sudden changes of residence, and of his hasty journey to the Continent in 1835, are only to be guessed at. He did not live much in the literary world of his time. Of the eighteen years of his writing activity, several in the middle were spent on the Continent, and several at the end in Norfolk. In a general way one gathers that the question of money was a very important, sometimes a very pressing one, with Marryat. Money earned, inherited, spent--money to be recovered from debtors, and, doubtless, paid to creditors, had much of his attention. It is manifest that he was what Carlyle would have called “a very expensive Herr.” He liked to lead a large life, and to show a gentlemanly indifference to money. By preference he lived in good houses, in good neighbourhoods, and it is not overrash or uncharitable to guess that his income was not always adequate to his expenses. Finally, he was addicted to some of the most effectual of all methods of evacuation. If he did not promote, or have to face, a petition, at least he went through a contested election; and he had Balzac’s mania for ingenious speculations, which ought to have realized wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and did achieve a dead loss with the most unfailing regularity. Like many another sailor before and since, he was sure that he could show the trained farmer how to extract more than he had yet done from the land. He undertook to do so on his small estate at Langham, in Norfolk--with disastrous financial results. That farming speculation was undoubtedly the type of much in his life.