A sight that lasted longer was the City State Barge, the _Maria Wood_, rotting at Kew Bridge almost to our own day, till it had to be broken up; but well on in the nineteenth century it still made a scene of junketings, and earlier it had cruised with aldermanic guests as far as Richmond and Twickenham, not to speak of that famous voyage to Oxford described in the _Middlesex_ volume of this series. Another lion of Kew in the early part of the last century was a pretentious modern structure, said to have been built from the materials of George III.’s unfinished palace, but as Sir R. Phillips notes them both on his walk this statement seems doubtful. It took the name of the Priory, that has been spread over a district of the present suburb.
The Priory was built by a Catholic parishioner. Romanists and Dissenters would have every chance of making way at Kew, when its living, still conjoined with Petersham, was held for ten years, from 1818, by Charles Caleb Colton, a parson who might well speak of himself as only a “finger-post” on the road to heaven. This eccentric divine was more concerned about angling in the Thames than to be a fisher of men. He did not live at either of his cures, but in shabby lodgings in Soho, going down to Kew only for necessary services, and spending the week-days after the manner of a Bohemian author, perhaps not unknown to Thackeray. At one time he carried on business, _sub rosâ_, as a wine-merchant, in cellars underneath a Methodist chapel, a possible hint for Mr. Sherrick’s dealings at Lady Whittlesea’s; but Colton had none of the Rev. Charles Honeyman’s suave humbug, while in some respects he may have sat as model for the coarser reprobate who blackmailed Philip Firmin’s father. His most unclerical pursuit was gambling, through which he got into some difficulty that packed him off to America in haste. He returned to put in an appearance at his living, which, however, seems now to have lapsed out of his incumbency. He next went to Paris, plunged head over heels into gaming, and blew out his brains in 1832. Yet this was the author of that once popular book _Lacon_, that among other edifying and sententious sentiments denounces the desperate gamester as doubly ruined: “He adds his soul to every other loss; and by the act of suicide renounces earth to forfeit heaven.” The cure of souls he had filled so unworthily passed into the hands of the Rev. R. B. Byam, who held it for forty years, in favour with all classes and especially with his chief parishioners, the royal dukes who still from time to time showed themselves in Kew Church.