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.