The healthy peasant, who rises with the sun, and breathes the free air of his native hills, may and will feel all the infliction of confinement, which, while it chains his limbs, stagnates his faculties. Not so the sedentary and solitary man of letters. Your cell becomes _his_ study: the window may be somewhat narrower--the lattice, that was wont to open to the climbing honeysuckle, may now be barred with its iron stanchions; but he soon forgets this. “His mind to him a palace is,” wherein he dwells at peace. Now, to put them on something of a par, I have a suggestion to make to the legislature, which I shall condense as briefly as possible. Never sentence your man of education, whatever his offence, to solitary confinement; but condemn him to dine out, in Dublin, for seven or fourteen years--or, in murder cases, for the term of his natural life. For slight offences, a week's dinners, and a few evening parties might be sufficient--while old offenders and bad cases, might be sent to the north side of the city. It may be objected to this--that insanity, which so often occurs in the one case, would supervene in the other; but I rather think not. My own experience could show many elderly people of both sexes, long inured to this state, who have only fallen into a sullen and apathetic fatuity; but who, bating deafness and a look of dogged stupidity, are still reasoning beings--what they once were, it is hard to say. But I take the man who, for some infraction of the law, is suddenly carried away from his home and friends--the man of mind, of reading, and reflection. Imagine him, day after day, beholding the everlasting saddle of mutton--the eternal three chickens, with the tongue in the midst of them; the same travesty of French cookery that pervades the side-dishes--the hot sherry, the sour Moselle: think of him, eating out his days through these, unchanged, unchangeable--with the same _cortege_ of lawyers and lawyers' wives--doctors, male and female--surgeons, subalterns, and, mayhap, attorneys: think of the old jokes he has been hearing from childhood still ringing in his ears, accompanied by the same laugh which he has tracked from its burst in boyhood to its last cackle in dotage: behold him, as he sits amid the same young ladies, in pink and blue, and the same elderly ones, in scarlet and purple; see him, as he watches every sign and pass-word that have marked these dinners for the long term of his sentence, and say if his punishment be not indeed severe. Then think how edifying the very example of his suffering, as, with pale cheek and lustreless eye--silent, sad, and lonely--he sits there! How powerfully such a warning must speak to others, who, from accident or misfortune, may be momentarily thrown in his society.