Again we move onwards, passing under a substantial arch of white stone, referred to in our “Walk round the Walls” as the NORTHGATE of the city. While the other three Gates were vested, by serjeantship, from time immemorial, in various noble families, this, the _porta septentrionalis_, as anciently belonged to the commorant citizens. Prior to 1808, when the present arch was erected, the NORTHGATE, if we may credit the engravings handed down to us, was a miserably effete and incongruous erection. What made it appear more so was the Gaol, or common prison of the city, which occupied a great part of the space around, above, and below it. A prison existed here from the earliest period; it is quoted in documents of the Norman earldom, and was at the time of its demolition a terrible specimen of legalised corruption—an establishment defying even the besom of a Howard to purge or purify. The city sheriff here saw execution done on all criminals capitally convicted within the county; here again the unfortunate debtor got “whitewashed,” and relieved of his “little odd scores;” and here were practised those “tortures thrice refined” which might put even the Great Inquisition to the blush. Far away from human gaze, fathoms deep in the solid rock, were chambers hewn, dreadful to survey, horrifying to think upon. Of these, two bore the distinguishing titles of “Little Ease,” and the “Dead Man’s Room.” The latter was the spot where condemned criminals awaited their execution, and was “a dark stinking place” in which snakes and other venomous reptiles gambolled at discretion. The “Little Ease,” as we read from a contemporary work, “was a hole hewed out in a rock; the breadth and cross from side to side was seventeen inches from the back to the inside of the great door; at the top seven inches, at the shoulders eight inches, and at the breast nine inches and a-half; with _a device to lessen the height_ as they were minded to torture the person put in, by drawboards which shot over across the two sides, to a yard in height, or thereabouts.” In those blissful times when Oliver Cromwell ruled England with an iron sceptre, these two “pleasantly situated furnished apartments” were in great request by the Barebones magistracy; and it is matter of record that, Locked in their cold embrace, numerous unoffending, peaceloving Quakers endured the rod of persecution for conscience sake. And yet, forsooth, _those_ were your oft-vaunted days of civil and religious liberty! Away with them all, say we! The Gaol, with its attendant miseries, has gone, but the dungeons we have pictured abide there still, beneath the ground we are now standing on,—though filled up, it is true, and for ever absolved from their ancient uses.