In the exercise of this authority, the keepers seem to have imitated the cruelties of the classical tyrant Mezentius, commemorated by Virgil as chaining the living to the dead, for the committee say: 'The various tortures and cruelties before mentioned not contenting these wicked keepers in their said pretended magistracy over the prisoners, they found a way of making within the prison a confinement more dreadful than the strong room itself, by coupling the living with the dead; and have made a practice of locking up debtors who displeased them in the yard with human carcasses. One particular instance of this sort of inhumanity, was of a person whom the keepers confined in that part of the lower yard which was then separated from the rest, whilst two dead bodies had lain there four days; yet was he kept there with them six days longer; in which time the vermin devoured the flesh from the faces, ate the eyes out of the heads of the carcasses, which were bloated, putrid, and turned green during the poor debtor's dismal confinement with them.' Some of the accounts given by the committee are as grotesque, without being so horrible. A certain Captain John M'Phaedris had been a person of considerable fortune, and, like many of his contemporaries, had been a victim to the South-sea speculation, which appears to have made all the debtors' prisons more than usually full between the years 1720 and 1725. He refused to pay the exorbitant fees demanded by the keeper for accommodation, and maintained that they were illegal. To silence so troublesome a person, he was turned, unsheltered, into the yard, where he had to remain exposed to the weather day and night. 'He sat quietly,' said the committee, 'under his wrongs, and, getting some poor materials, built a little hut to protect himself as well as he could from the injuries of the weather.' The keeper, seeing this ingenious abode, exclaimed with an oath that the fellow made himself easy, and ordered the hut to be pulled down. 'The poor prisoner,' we are told, 'being in an ill state of health, and the night rainy, was put to great distress.' In another instance, a prisoner had been committed to a cell so damp, as the witnesses described it, that they could sweep the water from the wall like dew from the grass. A feather-bed happened by some odd accident to be in the place, and the prisoner tore it up, and, for warmth, buried himself in the contents. Being covered with cutaneous sores, the feathers stuck to him, as if he had been subject to the operation of tarring and feathering. One Sunday, the door of the cell being left open, he rushed out, and entered the prison chapel during divine service--a horribly ludicrous figure. The committee, on the conclusion of the incident, say, 'he was immediately seized and carried back into the sad dungeon; where, through the cold, and the restraint, and for want of food, he lost his senses, languished, and perished.'