Page:Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus (Volume 1).djvu/325

 living on the other; for combining, in short, the man about town and the man of refined taste and high sympathies, led him into inevitable money difficulties, into shifts of all kinds, and convulsive efforts to raise the wind. How, in 1830, about half a dozen years subsequent to his connexion with The London and familiar intercourse with some of the most original men of that generation, he began insuring the life of a young and beautiful sister-in-law, for a short term, in various offices, to the amount of £18,000l. in all. How he contrived that the poor girl, after having made a will in his favour, should die before the two years' term was out, without any appearance of foul play,—he using the, then little known, vegetable poison, strychnine, now so familiar to newspaper readers. How the assurance offices instinctively disputed his claims; and, after five years of 'the law's delay' in Chancery and two trials at common law, succeeded in their resistance on the technical point—that the insurance was not a bonâ fide one of the deceased's own effecting: the graver ground of objection being waived, for want of conclusive evidence, though sufficient daylight was let in to warrant the darkest construction of Wainwright's real character. How, after skulking about France a few years, with a bottle of strychnine in his pocket, and, it is suspected, using the same on a confiding friend or two, Wainwright was, in 1836, apprehended for forgery of his wife's trustee's signature (he had a wife and child); was tried, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to transportation for life: finally made base revelations to the offices, enabling them to defeat the claims of his surviving sister-in-law, in the craven hope of mitigation of punishment; in which hope he was deceived. In the extremity of infamy and wretchedness, the somewhile associate of Coleridge, Blake, Lamb, still piqued himself on being the gentleman, though under a cloud; still claimed a soul sympathising with poetry, philosophy, and all high things, showing no remorse. In Australia ended the ghastly motley of his life, a few years ago.