This person was the son of a worthy gentleman of Carlisle, in the county of Cumberland, who possessed a considerable estate, and brought up his children suitably to his condition. Thomas, the subject of this memoir, received a liberal education, as his father intended that he should live free from the toil and hazard of business. The father dying, Thomas came into possession of the estate, which soon procured him a rich wife, who afterwards proved the chief cause of his ruin. She was loose in her conduct, and violated her matrimonial obligations, which drove him from his house to seek happiness in the tavern, or in the company of abandoned women. These by degrees perverted all the good qualities he possessed; nor was his estate less subject to ruin and decay; for the mortgages he made on it, in order to support his luxury and profusion, soon reduced his circumstances to the lowest ebb. Undisciplined in poverty, how could a man of his late affluent fortune, and unacquainted with business, procure a maintenance? He was possessed of too independent a spirit to stoop either to relations or friends for a precarious subsistence, and to solicit the benevolence of his fellow-men was what his soul abhorred. Starve he could not, and only one way of living presented itself to his choice--levying contributions on the road. This he followed for six or seven years with tolerable success; and we shall now relate a few of his most remarkable adventures. Upon his first outset he repaired to a friend, and with a grave face lamented his late irregularities, and declared his determination to live by some honest means; but for this purpose he required a little money to assist him in establishing himself, and hoped his friend would find it convenient to accommodate him. His friend was overjoyed at the prospect of his amendment and willingly lent him fifty pounds, with as many blessings and exhortations. But Witherington frustrated the expectations of his friend, and with the money bought himself a horse and other necessaries fit for his future enterprises.