O'Leary was the lion of the hour; his portrait looked out from the windows of Bond Street and Piccadilly, surrounded by soul-stirring sentiments culled from his published books.[624] There it was that Dr. Hussey sought to reduce his prestige, which he considered overcharged, and to destroy the confidence and respect usually manifested in his regard. It is certain that he felt as uncomfortable in his society as he had ever done in the hair shirt and enforced reserve of La Trappe. He did not brand O'Leary as a spy; he could not do so without offending the Government; but he raised what lawyers call 'a false issue.' Indeed O'Leary charges the doctor, on strong circumstantial evidence, with having supplied to the newspapers paragraphs in which an unworthy innuendo is advanced, and one by no means calculated to exalt the friar's reputation for asceticism: 'In proportion as the breach widened between us, the paragraphs rose in a climax to a greater degree of asperity.'[625] Many curious things transpire in this _brochure_, and amongst them the following: 'I got the very singular information,' writes O'Leary, 'that some years before, in a boarding school at Hampstead, then under his (Hussey's) direction, he took my picture out of a frame, tore it in several pieces, and cast it away with disdain, saying, "One would imagine he is founder of this establishment."'[626] Here again I submit that Dr. Hussey raised a false issue, and his dislike to O'Leary, as evidenced by this strong proceeding, must have had deeper grounds than the paltry plea assigned. When this affair relative to the picture happened [writes O'Leary] I was in Ireland, in the full bloom of my reputation,[627] which I would have preserved unfaded to the last moment of my existence, had it not spread on the lips of a man to whom I cannot apply the Italian proverb, Whatever your mouth touches, it heals: 'La vostra bocca sana quel die tocca' (p. 14). Dr. Hussey, as already stated, was in the secrets of the Crown. In 1784 Sydney tells Orde, rightly or wrongly, that O'Leary had consented to furnish private information. In 1789 O'Leary, as we have seen, removed to London and settled down in alarming proximity not only to Hussey, but to the minister of Spain. Hussey's attachment to Spanish interests, Cumberland states, outweighed his devotion to his English patrons, and of course it was highly inconvenient that a man who played fast and loose with both should be domesticated with O'Leary. 'They are all of them designing knaves,' writes Orde, and doubtless he and his colleagues, acting on the coarse prejudice thus expressed, urged the arrangement on the principle of 'set a thief to catch a thief.' The more refined Sydney probably calculated that it would be 'diamond cut diamond' between them.