It must not, however, be supposed that Chancery never releases its victims. We must be just to the laws of "Equity." There is actually a man now in London whom they have positively let out of prison! They had, however, prolonged his agonies during seventeen years. He was committed for contempt in not paying certain costs, as he had been ordered. He appealed from the order; but until his appeal was heard, he had to remain in durance vile. The Court of Chancery, like all dignified bodies, is never in a hurry; and, therefore, from having no great influence, and a very small stock of money to forward his interest, the poor man could only get his cause finally heard and decided on in December, 1849--seventeen years from the date of his imprisonment. And, after all, the Court decided that the original order was wrong; so that he had been committed for seventeen years _by mistake_! How familiar to him must have been the face of that poor, tottering man, creeping along to rest on the bench under the wall yonder. He is very old, but not so old as he looks. He is a poor prisoner, and another victim to Chancery. He has long ago forgotten, if he ever knew, the particulars of his own case, or the order which sent him to a jail. He can tell you more of the history of this gloomy place and its defunct brother, the Fleet, than any other man. He will relate you stories of the "palmy days" of the Fleet, when great and renowned men were frequently its denizens; when soldiers and sailors, authors and actors, whose names even then filled England with their renown, were prisoners within its walls; when whistling shops flourished and turnkeys were smugglers; when lodgings in the prison were dearer than rooms at the west-end of the town; and when a young man was not considered to have finished his education until he had spent a month or two in the Bench or the Fleet. He knows nothing of the world outside--it is dead to him. Relations and friends have long ceased to think of him, or perhaps even to know of his existence. His thoughts range not beyond the high walls which surround him, and probably if he had but a little better supply of food and clothing, he might almost be considered a happy man. But it is the happiness of apathy, not of the intelligence and the affections--the painless condition of a trance, rather than the joyous feeling which has hope for its bright-eyed minister. What has _he_ to do with hope? He has been thirty-eight years a Chancery prisoner. He is another out of twenty-four, still prisoners here, more than half of whom have been prisoners for above ten years, and not one of whom has any hope of release! A few have done something fraudulent in "contempt" of all law and equity; but is not even _their_ punishment greater than their crime? Let us turn away. Surely we have seen enough, though many other sad tales may be told, rivaling the horrors of Speilberg and French Lettres-de-cachet. Part XV. LAW AT A LOW PRICE.