the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech.' His
request, however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge
consoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis Artificiels
whose secret is only known to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died
of apoplexy, his sole living companion being a cat, for which he
had evinced at extraordinary affection.

His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They
gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early
work certainly lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster
mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received from her brother,
Major Power, who held a military appointment at Hobart Town, an oil
portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that
'he had contrived to put the expression of his own wickedness into
the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl.' M. Zola, in one of his
novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder,
takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist portraits of
perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious
resemblance to his victim. The development of Mr. Wainewright's
style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy an
intense personality being created out of sin.

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
literary London, and made so brilliant a debut in life and letters,
is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his
latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts
contained in this memoir, and whose little book is, indeed, quite
invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and
nature was a mere pretence and assumption, and others have denied
to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at least