This old fellow, by a confinement of twenty-seven years as a lunatic,
has thus enfranchised himself as a sort of denizen in this corporation;
and though he was formerly a seaman in the Royal Mary, and had fought
in several engagements during the Gallico-American war, particularly
in the action with Admiral Rodney, at the time of his victory on the
12th of April 1782, and capture of the Count de Grasse, he seems
to have quite forgotten his loyalty, and retains none of his naval
accomplishments, but his inveterate habit of swearing, and the coarser
part of his forecastle rhetoric in the dialect of Portsmouth point.
His favourite topic is damning the king and his ministers; profaning
and cursing the powers of heaven; like a sort of human mule, between
a radical and an atheist. He is constantly on foot, and is always
ready with a damn, a blow, or a blast for every person or object he
passes, which he usually follows up with the most gross and horrid
epithets of abuse and insulting comparison; but to ladies, and women
in general, his language is abominable. He used to wear in his hat an
old tuft, such as soldiers wear in their uniform caps, probably as an
emblem of his former militant profession: but this has been some time
worn bald, and abandoned. He is sometimes employed through the week in
white-washing parts of the hospital; but Sunday is his holiday, the
whole of which he devotes to perpetual damning, swearing, and ranting;
this he calls “working double tides.” Any attempt at confinement or
coercion renders him much worse: he seems in a perpetual state of
irritation, which gives constant stimulus to his profane and abusive
tongue; and his own eyes and limbs are the themes of his imprecation,
in the absence of other objects.