were it only on the ground of common sympathy. The gentleman gaoler of the Tower, who stood by him on the floor of the court while he made this application, was humanely employed in holding up the captive’s fetters to ease him, partially, of his dreadful burden. Prisoner’s counsel urged that the indignity of chains was unknown to his “majesty’s prisoners in the Tower;” that the gentleman gaoler and the warders did not know how to set about the hangman’s office of shackling captives; that there were no fetters in the Tower beyond the “Scavenger’s Daughter,” and the Spanish Armada relics, and that they had been obliged to procure fetters from Newgate. But Pratt, C.J., was inexorable. He was a stanch Whig; and, so civilly, but sternly remanded the prisoner, all ironed as he was, to the Tower. Christopher Layer was soon afterwards put out of his misery by being hanged, drawn, and quartered; but he was much loved by the people, and his head had not been long on Temple Bar when it was carried off as a relic. It is almost impossible to realize this cool, civil, legal savagery, in the era so closely following Anna Augusta’s silver age. Sir Walter Scott was in evidently an analogous bewilderment of horror when he described the execution of Feargus McIvor: a fiction certainly, but with its dreadful parallels of reality in the doom of Colonel Townely, Jemmy Dawson, Dr. Cameron, and scores more unfortunate and misguided gentlemen who suffered the horrible sentence of the law of high treason at Carlisle, at Tyburn, or on Kennington Common. [5] Hogarth painted a beautiful separate portrait of her—a loving, trustful face, and _such_ lips—which has been engraved in mezzotint. I should properly have added it to my catalogue of the Hogarthian Beauties. [6] A similar doubt—was it not by Lord Ellenborough?—has been expressed within our own times. [7] These horrors were not confined to the Fleet. The King’s Bench and the Marshalsea were nearly as bad: and, in the former prison, gangs of drunken soldiers—what could the officers have been about?—were frequently introduced to coerce the unhappy inmates. The Bench and Marshalsea were excellent properties. The patent rights were purchased from the Earl of Radnor for 5,000_l._, and there were some sixteen shareholders in the profits accruing from the gaol. Of the Marshalsea, evidence is given of the turnkeys holding a drinking bout in the lodge, and calling in a poor prisoner to “divert” them. On this miserable wretch they put an iron skull-cap and a pair of thumbscrews, and so tortured him for upwards of half-an-hour. Then, somewhat frightened, they gave him his discharge, as a _douceur_; but the miserable man fainted in the Borough High Street, and being carried into St. Thomas’s Hospital, presently died there.