worse debaucheries than those of the bottle easy of indulgence. At certain periods of their history the prisons seem to have been nothing less than vast bagnio-taverns, only the restriction upon the egress of the debtors distinguishing them from the common resorts of the town. The authorities of the jail were not supersensitive in their morality, provided their purses were kept filled. Wealth might riot, if it paid the piper, as readily and freely as poverty might rot for the wherewithal to buy a crust of bread. Roderick Random's naked debtor shivering in a scrap of worn-out carpet was no fiction of the King's Bench, nor Captain Blazer's banquets to his fair friends from over the river a romance. Smollet knew the Bench well enough. He had spent a term of probation behind its walls, and wrote "Sir Launcelot Greaves" within its rules. John Wilkes lay by the heels for one of his libels under its smoky roof, and hither came the mob to release him in 1768. The mob assembled in St. George's Field for the purpose, and thus in 1780 the Gordon Rioters gathered, who, a few days later, burst the prison gates and turned 700 prisoners loose before they put the rotten and reeking old jail to the torch. Combe was a prisoner under the rules of the King's Bench when he wrote "Dr. Syntax," and Haydon drew his idea of "The Mock Election" from a burlesque enacted among the prisoners while he was locked up in the jail for debt. A volume could be filled with the curious and characteristic events and personal episodes of the prison from the days of Wat Tyler down to 1862, when the last debtor passed out at the lodge gate, and the brief career of the King's Bench as a military prison began. Its history covered really that of two prisons, for after the attack of 1780 by the rioters, the old site was abandoned and another chosen for the rebuilding of the jail. In one of Dickens's last strolls in Southwark, he noticed the fact that no vestige of the King's Bench remained, but that a huge structure devoted to model homes for workingmen redeemed its unlamented grave from the uselessness which had made it a blight during many centuries. In Chapter 14 of Volume 2 of "Nicholas Nickleby," by the way, Dickens adverts to a feature of the law of which the King's Bench was one of the outgrowths, in connection with the first visit of Nicholas to Madeline Bray.