himself not guilty, but eventually pleaded guilty, by
advice of his lawyer, to two of the minor indictments
out of the five, and was therefore only
transported for life.

The moment the chief insurance offices
found that Wainewright was under sentence of
transportation for forgery, they determined to
open negotiations with the villain, and get from
him certain confessions necessary to their
interests: little doubting that he would make
them "for a consideration." He made them
readily enough when he had struck his bargain.
At this time, he was confined in Newgate
(modern prison discipline had not then found
its way into that jail) in a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep: in which polite company he was
actually recognised, through a strange chance, by
Mr. Procter and Mr. Macready, visiting the prison
with the Conductor of this Journal. When the
agent of the insurance offices had extracted from
the ruffian all that he wanted to know, that gentleman
said, in conclusion: " It would be quite
useless, Mr. Wainewright, to speak to you of
hummanity, or tenderness, or laws human or Divine;
but does it not occur to you, after all, that,
merely regarded as a speculation, Crime is a bad
one? See where it ends. I talk to you in a shameful
prison, and I talk to a degraded convict."
Wainewright returned, twirling his moustache:
"Sir, you City men enter on your
speculations, and take the chances of them. Some
of your speculations succeed, some fail. Mine
happen to have failed; yours happen to have
succeeded; that is the difference, sir, between
my visitor and me. But I'll tell you one thing
in which I have succeeded to the last. I have
been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I
do so, still. It is the custom of this place
that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy
a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep. But by
G—they never offer me the broom!"

On the same occasion, or on another similar
occasion in the same place, being asked how he
could find it in his heart to murder the trusting
girl who had so confided in him (meaning Miss
Abercrombie), he reflected for a moment, and
then returned, with a cool laugh: " Upon my
soul I don't know — unless it was that her legs
were too thick."

A more insupportable scoundrel never
troubled this earth. He had kept a Diary.
The insurance offices, by the masterly stroke of
sending to a French inn where he had lived,
paying the bill he had left unpaid, and demanding
the effects he had left there, obtained
possession of it. Description of this demoniacal
document cannot be attempted, but it contained
a kind of index to the details of his various
crimes, set forth with a voluptuous cruelty and a
loathsome exultation worthy of the diseased
vanity of such a masterpiece of evil.

In the mean time, says Mr. Talfourd, in his
version of the affair, proceedings were taken
on behalf of Miss Abercrombie's sister by
her husband, Mr. Wheatley, to render the
insurances available for her benefit, which
induced the prisoner to revengefully offer
communications to the insurance offices which
might defeat a purpose entirely foreign to his
own, and which he hoped might procure him,
through their intercession, a mitigation of the
more painful severities incident to his sentence.
In this expectation he was miserably
disappointed; for though, in pursuance of their
promise, the directors of one of the offices made a
communication to the Secretary of State for the
Home Department, the result, instead of a
mitigation, was an order to place him in irons, and to
send him to his place of punishment in the Susan,
a vessel about to convey three hundred convicts.

In Newgate, the gay-hearted creature was
sublime. He asserted himself as a poet, a
philosopher, and a martyr. He claimed for
himself " a soul whose nutriment is love, and
its offspring art, music, divine song, and still
holier philosophy." When writing even from the
hold of the convict-ship to complain of his
being placed in irons, he said: "They think me
a desperado. Me! the companion of poets,
philosophers, artists, and musicians, a desperado!
You will smile at this. No— I think you will
feel for the man, educated and reared as a
gentleman, now the mate of vulgar ruffians and
country bumpkins."

In 1842, the dandy convict was admitted as
in-patient of the General Hospital in Hobart
Town, where he remained some years. Whilst
an inmate of the hospital he forwarded to the
governor, Sir Eardley E. Wilmot, the following
memorial. It is too characteristic of the man
not to be given. The gilt had all gone now.
The governor's minute on the memorial is very
laconic: " A T. L. (ticket-of-leave) would be
contrary to Act of Parlt. T. L. refused. 3rd
class wages received? E. E. W."

To His Excellency, Sir John Eardley Wilmot
Bart, Lieut.-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, &c. &c.

The humble petition of T. Griffiths Wainewright,
praying the indulgence of a ticket-of-leave.

To palliate the boldness of this application he
offers the statement ensuing. That seven years past
he was arrested on a charge of forging and acting on
a power of attorney to sell stock thirteen years
previous. Of which (though looking for little credence)
he avers his entire innocence. He admits a
knowledge of the actual committer, gained though, some
years after the fact. Such, however, were their
relative positions, that to have disclosed it would have
made him infamous where any human feeling is
manifest. Nevertheless, by his counsel's direction,
he entered the plea NOT Guilty, to allow him to
adduce the " circonstance attenuante" viz. that the
money (5200l.) appropriated was, without quibble,
his own, derived from his parents. An hour before
his appearing to plead he was trepanned (through
the just but deluded Governor of Newgate) into
withdrawing his plea, by a promise, in such case,
of a punishment merely nominal. The same
purporting to issue from ye Bank Parlour, but in fact
from the agents of certain Insurance Companies
interested to a heavy amount (16,000l.) in
compassing his legal non-existence. He pleaded guilty
—and was forthwith hurried, stunned with such
ruthless perfidy, to the hulks at Portsmouth, and