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It appears singular why, having possessed himself of the poison, and knowing its almost instantaneous effect, he should have left his home, and gone out into the wild, dark night and distant solitude of Hampstead Heath, to perpetrate the despairing sin of self-murder. Perhaps the wretched man was goaded by the scorpion-stings of conscience to affinities closer to the condition of his mind than the conventional and ill-gotten luxuries around him. The cold damp earth, the sharp furze spines, the buffeting winds, the all-aloneness—save for the ghosts of lost opportunities, of great talents turned to infernal uses, of high respect and honours thrown away—seemed more in sympathy with the fierce frenzy, the unutterable horror, of his unmasked soul. Assuredly, no more terrible proof could be required that ‘sooner or later sin is its own avenger,’ than the suicide of John Sadleir.

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The oldest maps of London extant show two roads to Hampstead; Aggas’s (time of Elizabeth) has four. The most easterly of these roads ran out by Gray’s Inn Lane, past old St. Pancras and Battle Bridge, through Kentish Town and part of Holloway to Highgate, touching Caen Wood, and so by Bishop’s Wood and Wild Wood Corner to Hampstead. Later on a branch of this same Gray’s Inn or Battle Bridge Road ran off by St. Pancras a little to the west, into a country lane running up from Tottenham Court Road, into what is now the Hampstead Road, and so to Hampstead.[37]