The year ended with a great surprise. Mr. Charles Radcliffe literally walked out of Newgate without molestation! Wardens and turnkeys saw a strange gentleman, in a mourning suit and a brown tye-wig, pass them, and did not question him! This suit and wig were called his ‘disguise;’ but it was no better than a theatrical disguise, which deceives nobody, not even those who seem to be deceived. Mr. Radcliffe passed as easily to France as if no one was interested in stopping him. His old ‘chum’ in the room which they occupied together ‘in the Press Yard, overlooking the garden of the College of Physicians,’――Basil Hamilton――did not more easily pass into freedom, under the Act of Grace, than Charles Radcliffe did under his so-called disguise, and his resolution not to owe his freedom to the ‘Elector of Hanover.’ The chief wardens lost their places, which they had bought at 200_l._ a-piece, and which they were not allowed to sell; but they probably had already had their places’ worth from Radcliffe’s friends. The above dramatic incident was thus simply set down, with additions, in the newspapers. ‘Charles Radcliffe, Esq., brother to the late Earl of Derwentwater, made his escape out of Newgate on Thursday last, December 13, as did a few days before, Mr. James Swinburne out of the hands of persons who had him in cure for lunacy.’ Gibson of Stonycroft, Northumberland, less lucky, died of broken heart, in the prison which he could not ‘break,’ and from which he could not pass on plea of being mad. Radcliffe, like Wintoun, had all along refused every offer of royal pardon, a proud, honest, but in Radcliffe’s case, a fatal refusal. Had he been content to wait in bonds a little longer, he would have been in the Act of Grace whether he liked it or not. Thirty years later he pleaded, in vain, the pardon he had scornfully refused, and the Act, from the application of which he had withdrawn himself. [Sidenote: _THE STAGE AND PLAYGOERS._]