And these three months he had to spend--for such was the wretched arrangement of the time--in the worst society in the world. In sketching, as he sometimes did, for the general amusement, the characters of the various prisoners with whom he had associated--from the sneaking pick-pocket and the murderous ruffian, to the simple Highland smuggler, who had converted his grain into whisky, with scarce intelligence enough to see that there was aught morally wrong in the transaction--he sought only to be as graphic and humorous as he could, and always with complete success. But there attached to his narratives an unintentional moral; and I cannot yet call them up without feeling indignant at that detestable practice of promiscuous imprisonment which so long obtained in our country, and which had the effect of converting its jails into such complete criminal-manufacturing institutions, that, had the honest men of the community risen and dealt by them as the Lord-George-Gordon mob dealt with Newgate, I hardly think they would have been acting out of character. Poor Charles had a nobility in his nature which saved him from being contaminated by what was worst in his meaner associates; but he was none the better for his imprisonment, and he quitted jail, of course, a marked man; and his after career was, I fear, all the more reckless in consequence of the stain imparted at this time to his character. He was as decidedly a leader among his brother workmen as I myself had been, when sowing my wild oats, among my schoolfellows; but society in its settled state, and in a country such as ours, allows no such scope to the man as it does to the boy; and so his leadership, dangerous both to himself and his associates, had chiefly as the scene of its trophies the grosser and more lawless haunts of vice and dissipation. His course through life was a sad, and, I fear, a brief one. When that sudden crash in the commercial world took place, in which the speculation mania of 1824-25 terminated, he was, with thousands more, thrown out of employment; and, having saved not a farthing of his earnings, he was compelled, under the pressure of actual want, to enlist as a soldier into one of the regiments of the line, bound for one of the intertropical colonies. And there, as his old comrades lost all trace of him, he too probably fell a victim, in an insalubrious climate, to old habits and new rum.