Baffling disappointments and romantic episodes

After a series of baffling disappointments and romantic episodes he at length overtook his “ Euridyce,” with whom he returned to London, only to find himself a little while later the inmate of a debtors’ prison. From this unpleasant position, after an ineffectual attempt at gaol-breaking, he was released by his brother- in-law, the Irish Lord Chancellor, who happened to be in town at the time. “ Determined,” as he says, “ not to stay another hour in London,” Whaley then set out for Dublin.

Here he disposed of all his remaining estates for the discharge of his personal debts, and with the surplus, which amounted to about five thousand pounds, true to the spirit of gambling to which he had always been a ready slave, he resolved to try his fortune at play, and either retrieve himself or complete his ruin. “ The latter,” he says, “ was my fate, for in one winter I lost ten thousand pounds, which obliged me to sell all my own jewels, and those I had given to my companion in better days : so that in the course of a few years I dissipated a fortune of near four hundred thousand pounds, and contracted debts to the amount of thirty thousand more, without ever purchasing or acquiring contentment or one hour’s true happiness.”

Hopeless condition of insolvency

He retired shortly afterwards to the Isle of Man in a hopeless condition of insolvency, where he tells us he divided his time between the education of his children, the improvement of a small farm, and the writing of his Memoirs. He ends his story of a wasted and riotous life in a spirit of contrition and remorse, expressing a hope that what he had written might prove of some service to other young men exposed to temptations like his own.

For the continuous folly and eccentricities of Whaley’s ill-spent life it is difficult to account in any rational way ; but, with his accustomed hardihood, he does not shrink from the attempt himself.