cure of nervous distempers." The third cause is gaming, and the fourth the state of the poor-law. Fielding was, in the matter of law-reform, far in advance of his age; and he points out with great force and acuteness the defects of our boasted system of jurisprudence. "There is," he says, "no branch of the law more bulky, more full of confusion and contradiction, I had almost said of absurdity, than the law of evidence as it now stands." And yet that law was suffered to remain unchanged until a few years ago! He had the good sense to suggest the improvement, which has only just been sanctioned by Parliament, of private instead of public executions, and he exhausts the argument for it in a few words, when he says: "If executions, therefore, could be so contrived that few could be present at them, they would be much more shocking and terrible to the crowd without-doors than at present, as well as much more dreadful to the criminals themselves, who would thus die only in the presence of their enemies; and thus the boldest of them would find no cordial to keep up his spirits, nor any breath to flatter his ambition."

The subject of executions in the last century and during a great part of the present, is really almost too dreadful to dwell upon. It is sickening to turn over the pages of the Annual Register and see what a holo

caust of victims was given over to the hangman for offences which now would be punished by a few months' imprisonment. There was quite a trade in "last dying speeches." "I continued," says Thomas Gent, printer of York, in his autobiography, speaking of 1733, "working for Mr. Woodfall until the execution of Counsellor Layer, on whose few dying words I formed observations in the nature of a large speech, and had a run of sale for about three days successively, which obliged me to keep in my own apartments, the unruly hawkers being ready to pull my press in pieces for the goods."

CHAPTER III.

PRISONS.-DRUNKENNESS.-SWEARING.-GAMBLING.-DUELLING.

JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.-COUNTRY SQUIRE.

THE mention of robberies leads naturally to speak of prisons, and it is shocking to think of what they were. They were more like dens of wild beasts than habitations of men. Some idea of the condition of the Fleet may be obtained from the perusal of a report of a Committee of the House of Commons in 1729, when the House resolved that several of the officers of the prison should be committed to Newgate, and some of them were afterward tried for murder, but acquitted. Nothing in fiction exceeds the reality of the horrible disclosures which these trials brought to light. The following is a description of the dungeon called the strong room : *

"This place is like a vault, like those in which the dead are interred, and wherein the bodies of persons dying in the said prison are usually deposited till the coroner's inquest hath passed upon them; it has no

*Howell's 'State Trials,' vol. xvii. p. 298.

chimney nor fireplace, nor any light but what comes over the door, or through a hole of about eight inches square. It is neither paved nor boarded; and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being neither wainscoted nor plastered. What adds to the dampness and stench of the place is its being built over the common sewer, and adjoining to the sink and dunghill, where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In this miserable place, the poor wretch was kept by the said Bambridge, manacled and shackled for near two months."

At one of the trials the following evidence was given : *

Mr. Ward.-Was Acton there?

Demotet.-Acton came and saw Newton locked into the strong room. When he was first put in, Captain Delagol was confined there at the same time. Mr. Ward.-Was Newton sick in the strong room? Demotet. He fell sick there; both of them were lousy; his wife and young child came to take care of her husband, and petitioned to Mr. John Darrell to have him released; he was put in the sick-room, and there died in four or five days after. His wife broke her heart, and she and the little child died in the same week.

*Howell's 'State Trials,' vol. xvii. p. 531.

Mr. Ward.-What was the occasion of his being sick?

Demotet.-That he was on the ground; he had no bed to lie on, and the water came in on the top.

Mr. Ward.-What kind of place is the strong room?

Demotet. It is not fit to put a man in; the rain comes in.

Mr. Baron Carter.-Were you ever in it?
Demotet.-I was in it myself; Grace put me in

there.

Mr. Baron Carter.-How long were you in the strong room?

Demotet.-I was in there for ten minutes, and there were two dead men in at the same time, and I fell sick for five months.

Mr. Marsh.-Was it infested with rats?

Demotet.-It was very much infested with rats and vermin.

Large sums were extorted from the wretched prisoners in the shape of fees. In the case of Huggins and Bambridge, reported on by the same Committee of the House of Commons, in 1729, the judges reprimanded them, and declared that "a jailer could not answer the ironing of a man before he was found guilty of crime; but it being out of term, they could