I pulled a wry mouth, remembering the dismal crew in the Fleet Prison.  But though, the confession being forced from him, he ended wistfully and as if upon a question, I did not offer to come.  It seemed a mighty dull way to finish a summer’s afternoon.  Moreover I was nettled.  So I let him go and watched him through the gate, thinking bitterly that our friendship was sick and drooping by no fault of mine.

The truth was—­or so I tried to excuse him—­that beside his plaguey trick of falling in and out of love he had an overhanging quarrel with his father, a worthy man, tyrannous when crossed, who meant him for the law.  Nat abhorred the law, and, foreseeing that the tussel must come, vexed his honest conscience with the thought that while delaying to declare war he was eating his father’s bread.  This thought, working upon the ferment of youth, kept him like a colt in a fretful lather.  He scribbled verses, but never finished so much as a sonnet; he flung himself into religion, but chiefly, I thought, to challenge and irritate his undevout friends; and he would drop any occupation to rail at me and what he was pleased to call my phlegm.

He had some reason too, though at the time I could not discover it.  Now, looking back, I can see into what a stagnant calm I had run.  My boyhood should have been over; in body I had shot up to a great awkward height; but for the while the man within me drowsed and hung fire.  I lived in the passing day and was content with it.  Nat’s gusts of passion amused me, and why a man should want to write verses or fall in love was a mystery at which I arrived no nearer than to laugh.  For this (strange as it may sound) I believe the visit to London was partly to blame.  Nothing had come of it, except that the unhappy King Theodore had gained his release and improved upon it by dying, a few weeks later, in wretched lodgings in Soho; where, at my father’s expense, the church of St. Anne’s now bore a mural tablet to his memory with an epitaph obligingly contributed by the Hon. Horace Walpole, since Earl of Orford.

Near this place is interred
THEODORE KING OF CORSICA
who died in this parish
Dec. 11, 1756
immediately after leaving
The King’s Bench Prison by
the benefit of the Act of Insolvency
in consequence of which
he registered his kingdom of Corsica
for the use of his creditors.

The grave, great teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley slaves and kings;
But Theodore this moral learned ere dead: 
Fate poured his lesson on his living head,
Bestow’d a kingdom, and denied him bread.