The following remarks, which I think were written about the same time, stand in his journal: “Never was meanness equal to mine—never was contempt expressed with more poignant insult. This is the damning consequence of unlawful pleasure.—Pleasure do I call it?—It is pain equal to the severest torture of hell. How intolerably slavish are the galling chains with which sin binds her hopeless victims!” Amid the multitude of vices by which his life was so foully stained, and his heart so deplorably corrupted, still there were some traits in his character that strongly demonstrated original nobleness of mind. When brutal passion was not to be gratified, he was feelingly alive to the tale of sorrow, and his purse was ever open to relieve the distressed, and administer comfort to the afflicted. His style of living was proportioned to his ample fortune, and in money matters he was always open, liberal, and generous, sometimes so even to profuse extravagance. But his mind, long neglected and vitiated, was now incapable of entertaining a single virtue, or even a shattered remnant of self-dignity. His disposition became so entirely changed, that the original intention of nature appears to have been inverted. That generosity which formerly excited admiration, gave place to the most niggardly and despicable turn of mind, so that he could not bear the idea of parting with money even to discharge his lawful debts. Those ephemeral friends to whom crime only had attached him, now treated him with coolness, and in many instances with the most cutting contempt. Despised by all his former acquaintances, both sober and dissipated, he exhibited the melancholy picture of a man possessing an excellent understanding, a mind amply stored with elegant and useful knowledge, and a princely fortune, isolated in the world, and scornfully driven, by the common consent of mankind, from that society of which, had he made a right use of his natural endowments, he would have been a distinguished ornament. Meanness, marked by dishonesty, was strongly exemplified in his refusing to honour a bill which the unhappy girl he left in Scotland, as he supposed on a death-bed, had drawn to discharge the expense of the lodgings he had procured for her. The physician’s bill, too, he refused to discharge. The poor forsaken creature wrote to him, describing her situation in terms that ought to have moved the most obdurate heart; but his, now completely imbruted, was dead to the description of her misery, and deaf to her entreaties. She wrote again, but he would not pay the postage of her letter. The family in which he had placed her, trusting to the debt thus incurred for the payment of their rent, which they could not in any other way make up, were turned out of doors, and with them the wretched patient, now in the last stage of consumption, without a penny to procure a morsel of bread.