“Jack Ketch’s Warren,” from the fact that the greater part of the persons hanged at Newgate came from the lanes and alleys in the vicinity. The disturbances that occurred in these low quarters were often so great that from forty to fifty constables armed with cutlasses were marched down, it being often impossible for officers to act in fewer numbers or disarmed. Some of the houses close beside the Fleet Ditch were fitted with dark closets, trapdoors, sliding panels, and other means of escape, while extensive basements served for the purpose of concealing goods; and in others there were furnaces used by coiners and stills for the production of excisable spirits. It was here that in 1843 the Ragged School movement in London commenced its wonderful and praiseworthy career. Naturally in this connection I must speak of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the great philanthropist of the Victorian era, a nobleman whose long and honourable life was spent in the service of man and the fear of God. He was somewhat narrow-minded, an Evangelical Churchman of a now almost extinct type, not beloved by Cobden and the Free Traders, occasionally very vehement in his utterances, a man who, if he had stuck to the party game of politics, would have taken a high place in the management of public affairs. I knew him well, and he was always friendly to me. In his prime he must have been a remarkably handsome man, tall, pale, with dark hair and a commanding presence. Perhaps he took life a little too seriously. To shake hands with him, said his brother, was a solemn function. But his earnestness might well make him sad, as he saw and felt the seriousness of the great work to which he had devoted his life. He had no great party to back him up. The Dissenters regarded him with suspicion, for he doubted their orthodoxy, and in his way he was a Churchman to the core. He was too much a Tory for the Whigs, and too Radical a philanthropist for the old-fashioned Tory fossils then abounding in the land. On one occasion Lord Melbourne, when dining with the Queen in his company, introduced him to royalty as the greatest Jacobin in her dominions. In Exeter Hall he reigned supreme, and though dead he still lives as his works survive. He was the friend of all the weak, the poor, the desolate who needed help. He did much to arouse the aristocracy to the discharge of their duties as well as the maintenance of their rights. All the world is the better for his life. It was a miracle to me how his son, the eighth Earl, came to commit suicide, as he always seemed to me the cheerfullest of men, of the rollicking sailor type. I often met him on board the steamer which took us all down the river to the _Chichester_ and _Arethusa_, founded by the late Mr. William Williams in 1843—a good man for whom Earl Shaftesbury had the most ardent esteem—as refuges for homeless and destitute children to train up for a naval career.