But we have wandered far from Newgate in this wicked company. Old Newgate, upon a portion of whose site the present jail stands, was built in the reign of King John. It derived its name from the fact that London was then a walled city, and the jail was erected close to the newest gate in the fortification. It was, in fact, at first a mere tower or appendage of the gate. Newgate was used as a State prison long before the Tower. One of the many captives of this sort which it held was William Penn. The founder of Pennsylvania spent six months there for the atrocious offense of street preaching. Defoe spent some time here on account of a political tract, and wrote several others while in confinement. Dr. Dodd wrote his successful comedy, "Sir Roger de Coverly," in Newgate. One of the last persons confined here for political offense was Mr. Hobhouse, afterward Lord Broughton. The street used to be filled with people when he took his exercise on the roof, who watched and cheered at his hat, which was all they could see of him above the wall. An odd circumstance about Mr. Hobhouse's imprisonment is that Byron had prophesied it in the remark that "having foamed himself into a reformer, he would subside in Newgate." Among the famous prisoners here we find Savage, the poet, for murder; Jack Sheppard, whose remarkable escape, very much exaggerated upon fact, you may have read of from Mr. Ainsworth's pen; and Jonathan Wild, who, by the by, once lived nearly opposite the court-house, in the Old Bailey; Catherine Hayes, the abandoned heroine of Thackeray's novel; Mrs. Brownrigg, the fiend who tortured her serving-maids; Astlett, the Bank of England clerk, who committed forgeries for over $1,500,000, and many more. Lord George Gordon, familiar to all who have read "Barnaby Rudge," died in 1793, of gaol-fever, in one of the cells of Newgate, after several years of confinement, for libelling the Queen of France. The poor, mad lord, whose rioters had turned the jail into a ruin once, found it strong enough to hold him and his fantastic visions securely in the end. Here is Dickens's description of the attack upon the prison, caused by him, commencing in the second volume of "Barnaby Rudge," Chapter Fifth. "It was about six o'clock in the evening when a vast mob poured into Lincoln's Inn Fields by every avenue, and divided, evidently in pursuance of a previous design, into several parties. It must not be understood that this arrangement was known to the whole crowd, but that it was the work of a few leaders, who, mingling with these men as they came upon the ground, and calling to them to fall into this or that party, effected it as rapidly as if it had been determined on by a council of the whole number, and every man had known his place.