e picnicked with the ladies,
it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay,
but on the edge of the precipice.

I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling.
Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every
Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club. His
essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, _The Connoisseur_, written
some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead
one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have
equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was something
of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a
solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady
Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister,
Theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "There was I, and the future
Lord Chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in
giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." Such was his
life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. He
had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a
schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St.
Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in his
chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious
melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of
George Herbert. Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a
rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his
genius or his wit,

But to divert a fierce banditti
(Sworn foe to everything that's witty)
That, in a black infernal train,
Make cruel inroads in my brain,
And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense.

It was not till after his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in his
thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures
on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of
creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his
brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a
damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still
deeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was
for the most part such as would make the average modern pleas