The Baron was a most implacable enemy of the Catholics, as Catholics. There was rather a peculiar reason for this, his grand-father having been a _French Hugonot_ and having fled with his children to England, at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantz. The Baron was a very humane man; his humanity made him assist to support the French emigrant priests; but, at the same time, he caused Sir Richard Musgrave's book against the Irish Catholics to be published at his own expense. He and I never agreed upon this subject; and this subject was, with him, a _vital_ one. He had no asperity in his nature; he was naturally all gentleness and benevolence; and, therefore, he never _resented_ what I said to him on this subject (and which nobody else ever, I believe, ventured to say to him): but he did not like it; and he liked it less because I certainly beat him in the argument. However, this was long before he visited me in Newgate: and it never produced (though the dispute was frequently revived) any difference in his conduct towards me, which was uniformly friendly to the last time I saw him before his memory was gone. There was great excuse for the Baron. From his very birth he had been taught to hate and abhor the Catholic religion. He had been told, that his father and mother had been driven out of France by the Catholics: and there was _that mother_ dinning this in his ears, and all manner of horrible stories along with it, during all the tender years of his life. In short, the prejudice made part of his very frame. In the year 1803, in August, I think it was, I had gone down to his house on a Friday, and was there on a Sunday. After dinner he and I and his brother walked to the Priory, as is still called the mansion house, in the dell at Reigate, which is now occupied by Lord Eastnor, and in which a Mr. Birket, I think, then lived. After coming away from the Priory, the Baron (whose native place was Betchworth, about two or three miles from Reigate) who knew the history of every house and every thing else in this part of the country, began to tell me why the place was called _the Priory_. From this he came to the _superstition_ and _dark ignorance_ that induced people to found monasteries; and he dwelt particularly on the _injustice to heirs and relations_; and he went on, in the usual Protestant strain, and with all the bitterness of which he was capable, against those _crafty priests_, who thus _plundered families_ by means of the influence which they had over people in their dotage, or who were naturally weak-minded.