Falconer had now left his cabin study with its many pleasant accommodations, and become a scribbler of all work in a London garret. Here his existence ran on for a while in an obscure and probably miserable current. It is said that Murray, the bookseller, the father of 'the' John Murray, of Albemarle Street, wished to take the poet into partnership,--upon terms of great advantage,--but that Falconer, for reasons which are not known, declined the offer. "My Murray," as Byron calls him, was destined instead to have his name connected with a grander and ghastlier shipwreck than it lay in the brain of the projected partner of his firm to conceive, or in his genius to execute--that, namely, described in the ever-detestable, yet ever-memorable, second canto of "Don Juan." In 1769, a third edition of his poem was called for, and he was employed in making improvements and additions when he was again summoned to sea. In his hurry of departure, he is said to have committed these to the care of the notorious David Mallett, the son of a Crieff innkeeper, the friend of Thomson, the biographer of Bacon, and, as Johnson called him, the "beggarly Scotchman, who drew the trigger of Bolingbroke's blunderbuss of infidelity," who seems to have paid no manner of attention to his trust, as mistakes in the nautical terms and a frequent inferiority in execution manifest. Falconer had undoubtedly thought the sea a hard and sickening profession; but latterly found that writing for the booksellers was a slavery still more abject and unendurable. He resolved once more to embark upon the "melancholy main." Often as he had hugged its horrors, laid his hand on its mane, and narrowly escaped its devouring jaws, he was drawn in again as by the fatal suction of a whirlpool into its power. Perhaps he had imbibed a passion for the sea. At all events, he accepted the office of purser to the Aurora frigate, which was going out to India, and on the 30th of September 1769, he left England for ever. The Aurora was never heard of more! Some vague rumours, indeed, prevailed of a contradictory character--that she had been burned--that she had foundered in the Mozambique Channel--that she had been cast away on a reef of rocks near Macao--that five persons had been saved from her wreck, but nothing certain transpired, except that she was lost; and this fine singer of the sea along with her. Unfortunate Aurora! dawn soon overcast! Unfortunate poet, so speedily removed! "It was that fatal and perfidious bark, Built i' the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark, That laid so low that sacred head of thine." The drowning of one poet of far loftier genius in the Bay of Spezia, latterly proved that the offering up of Falconer's life had not fully appeased the wrath of old Neptune, and that bards may still entertain, in the lines of Wordsworth, "Of the old sea some reverential fear."