He
appears to have had no definite plan of action. The death of his uncle
Contarine, and the neglect of his relatives and friends to reply to his
letters, seem to have produced in him a temporary feeling of loneliness and
destitution, and his only thought was to get to London and throw himself
upon the world. But how was he to get there? His purse was empty. England
was to him as completely a foreign land as any part of the Continent, and
where on earth is a penniless stranger more destitute? His flute and his
philosophy were no longer of any avail; the English boors cared nothing for
music; there were no convents; and as to the learned and the clergy, not
one of them would give a vagrant scholar a supper and night's lodging for
the best thesis that ever was argued. "You may easily imagine," says he, in
a subsequent letter to his brother-in-law, "what difficulties I had to
encounter, left as I was without friends, recommendations, money, or
impudence, and that in a country where being born an Irishman was
sufficient to keep me unemployed. Many, in such circumstances, would have
had recourse to the friar's cord or the suicide's halter. But, with all my
follies, I had principle to resist the one, and resolution to combat the
other.
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