Sedgemoor! Oh! for the beauteous slatterns, the Phrynes and Aspasias of this Fleet Street Athens, with their paint and their black visor masques; their organ-pipe head-dresses, their low stomachers, and their high-heeled shoes; the tresses of dead men’s hair they thatched their poor bald crowns withal; the live fools’ rings and necklaces they sported between taking out and pawning in! Beggars, cut-purses, swindlers, tavern-bilks, broken life-guardsmen, foreign counts, native highwaymen, and some poor honest unfortunates, the victims of a Draconic law of debtor and creditor, all found their Patmos turn out to be a mere shifting quicksand. The town does not long remain troubled with these broken spars and timbers of the wrecked ship--once a tall caravel--Humanity. Don’t you remember when the “Holy Land” of St. Giles’s was pulled down to build New Oxford Street, what an outcry arose as to where the dispossessed Gilesians were to find shelter? and don’t you remember how quickly they found congenial holes and corners into which to subside--dirt to dirt, disease to disease, squalor to squalor, rags to rags? So with the Alsatians. A miserable compensation is made to them for their lost sanctuary by the statute which quashes all foregone executions for debts under fifty pounds; but they soon get arrested again--often for sums not much more than fifty pence--and, being laid up in hold, starve and rot miserably. There are debtors in Newgate, there are debtors in Ludgate; in the Clink, the Borough, Poultry, and Wood Street Compters, the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench, and at Westminster Gate houses, besides innumerable spunging houses, or “spider’s webs,” with signs like inns, such as the “Pied Bull” in the Borough, and the “Angel” in Cursitor Street. Little boy Hogarth will have much to observe about prisons and prisoners when he is grown to be a man. Many Alsatians take refuge in the Southwark Mint, likewise, and by the same statute deprived of its sanctuary; but which, in some underhand manner--perhaps from there being only one bridge into Southwark, and that rotten--contrives to evade it till late in the reign of George I. Coining flourishes thenceforth more than ever in the Mint; the science of Water Lane being added to the experience of St. Mary Overy, and both being aided, perhaps, by the ancient numismatic traditions of the place. More of the Alsatians are caught up by alguazils of the criminal law, and, after a brief sojourn at Newgate, “patibulate” at Justice Hall, and eventually make that sad journey up Holborn Hill in a cart, stopping for a refresher at the Bowl House, St. Giles’s Pound--alas! it is not always staying for his liquor that will save the saddler of Bawtree from hanging--and so end at Tyburn. Some, too, go a-begging in Lincoln’s Inn, and manufacture some highly remunerative mutilations and ulcers. And some, a very few, tired of the draff and husks in Alsatia, go back to their fathers, and are forgiven.