“It is for slaves to lie, and for freemen to speak truth.

“In the examples, which I here bring in, of what I have heard, read, done, or said, I have forbid myself to dare to alter even the most light and indifferent circumstances. My conscience does not falsify one tittle. What my ignorance may do, I cannot say.”       Montaigne.

At the beginning of the year 1808, my brother John and myself set up the weekly paper of the Examiner, in joint partnership. The spirit of the theatrical criticism continued the same as in the News, for several years; by which time reflection, and the society of better critics, had made me wiser. In politics I soon got interested, as a man; though I never could bear them, as a writer. It was against the grain that I was encouraged to begin them; and against the grain I ever afterwards sat down to write, except when the subject was of a very general description and I could introduce philosophy and the belles lettres. People accused me of conspiring with Cobbett and my gallant namesake, Henry Hunt; when the fact is, I never beheld either of them: so private a public man have I been. I went criminally late to my political article; gave a great deal of trouble to printers and newsmen, for which I am heartily sorry; and hastened back as fast as I could to my verses and books, among which I had scarcely a work upon politics. The progress of society has since deeply interested me, and I should do better now, because I have better learnt the value of time, and politics have taken with me a wider and kindlier aspect: but owing to a dispute of a very painful nature, in which every body thought himself in the right,

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and was perhaps more or less in the wrong, I have long ceased to have any hand in the Examiner, and latterly to have any property in it. I shall therefore say nothing more of the paper, except that I was very much in earnest in all I wrote; that I was in a perpetual fluctuation, during the time, of gay spirits and wretched health, which conspired to make me a sensitive observer, and a very bad man of business; and that I think precisely as I did on all subjects when I last wrote in it:—with this difference,—that I am inclined to object to the circumstances that make the present state of society what it is, still more; and to individuals who are the creatures of those circumstances, not at all.

“Some of my readers may remember that my brother and myself were sentenced to a two years’ imprisonment for a libel on the Prince Regent; I say, without hesitation, a libel; since the word means no more, now-a-

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days, either for a man or against him, than its original signification of ‘a little book.’ Let those thank themselves that such is the case, who by their own confusion of terms and penalties, and their application of one and the same word to the lowest private scandal and the highest impulses of public spirit, have rendered honest men not ashamed of it. It is remarkable, that the same Whig Judge (Lord Ellenborough) who had directed the Jury to find us innocent on a prior occasion, when we were indicted for saying that ‘of all Monarchs since the Revolution, the successor of George the Third (then reigning) would have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular,’ had now the task of giving them a very different intimation, because we thought that the Regent had not acted up to his opportunities. I was provoked to write the libel by the interest I took in the disappointments of the Irish nation, which had very particular claims on the promises of his Royal Highness; but what, perhaps, embittered it most in the palate of that illustrious Personage, was its contradiction of an awkward panegyric which had just appeared on him from the pen of some foolish person in the ‘Morning Post,’ calling him, at his time of life, a charmer of all hearts and an Adonis of loveliness. At another time, I should have laughed at this in a rhyme or two, and remained free; the courts of law having a judicious instinct against the reading of merry rhymes; but the two things coming together, and the Irish venting their spleen pretty stoutly over their wine at the dinner on St. Patrick’s Day, (indeed they could not well be more explicit, for they groaned and hissed when his name was mentioned,) I wrote an attack equally grave and vehement, and such as every body said would be prosecuted. Little did I foresee, that, in the course of a few years, this same people, the Irish, would burst into an enthusiasm of joy and confidence, merely because the illustrious Personage

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paid them a visit! I will not say they were rightly served, in finding that nothing came of it, for I do not think so; especially as we are not bound to take the inhabitants of a metropolis as representatives of the wretched millions in other parts of the country, who have since been in worse state than before. But this I may be allowed to say, that if ever I regretted having gone to prison in their behalf, it was then and then only.

“Between the verdict and the passing of sentence, a circumstance occurred, not of so singular a nature, perhaps, as it may seem. We were given to understand, through the medium of a third person, but in a manner emphatically serious and potential, that if we would abstain in future from commenting upon the actions of the royal Personage, means would be found to prevent our going to prison. The same offer was afterwards repeated, as far as the payment of a fine was concerned, upon our going thither. I need not add, that we declined both. We do not mean to affirm, that these offers came directly or indirectly from the quarter in which they might be supposed to originate; but we know the immediate quarter from which they did come; and this we may affirm, that of all the ‘two hundred and fifty particular friends,’ who dined on one occasion at Carlton House, and delighted the public with that amazing record of attachment, his Royal Highness had not one more zealous or liberal in his behalf.

“The expectation of a prison was in one respect very formidable to me; for I had been a long time in a bad state of health; and when notice was given that we were to be brought up for judgment, I had just been advised by the physician to take exercise every day on horseback, and go down to the sea-side. I was resolved, however, to do no disgrace either to the courage which I really possessed, or

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to an example which I can better speak of in any other place than this. I accordingly put my countenance in its best trim: I made a point of wearing my best apparel; put on my new hat and gloves, and descended into the legal arena to be sentenced gallantly. As an instance of the imagination which I am accustomed to mingle with every thing, I was at that time reading a little work, to which Milton is indebted, the Comus of Erycius Puteanus; and this, which is a satire on ‘Bacchuses and their revellers,’ I pleased myself with having in my pocket. It is necessary, on passing sentence for a libel, to read over again the words that composed it. This was the business of Lord Ellenborough, who baffled the attentive audience in a very ingenious manner by affecting every instant to hear a noise, and calling upon the Officers of the Court to prevent it. Mr. Garrow, the Attorney-General, (who had succeeded Sir Vicary Gibbs at a very cruel moment, for the indictment had been brought by that irritable person, and was the first against us which took effect,) behaved to us with a politeness that was considered extraordinary. Not so Mr. Justice Grose, who delivered the sentence. To be didactic and old womanish belonged to his office; but to lecture us on pandering to the public appetite for scandal, was what we could not so easily bear. My brother, as I had been the writer, expected me, perhaps, to be the spokesman; and speak I certainly should have done, had not I been prevented by the dread of a hesitation in my speech, to which I had been subject when a boy, and the fear of which (perhaps idly, for I hesitate least among strangers, and very rarely at all) has been the main cause, I believe, that I have appeared and acted in public less than any other public man. There is reason to think, that Lord Ellenborough was still less easy than ourselves. He knew that we were acquainted with his visits to Carlton-house and Brighton, (sympathies not eminently decent in a Judge,) and

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the good things he had obtained for his kinsmen, and we could not help preferring our feelings at the moment to those which induced him to keep his eyes fixed on his papers, which he did almost the whole time of our being in Court, never turning them once to the place on which we stood. There were divers points besides those, on which he had some reason to fear that we might choose to return the lecture of the Bench. He did not even look at us, when he asked, in the course of his duty, whether it was our wish to make any remarks. I answered, that we did not wish to make any there, and Sir Nash proceeded to pass sentence. At the sound of two years’ imprisonment in separate jails, my brother and myself instinctively pressed each other’s arm. It was a heavy blow: but the pressure that acknowledged it, encouraged the resolution to bear it; and I do not believe either of us interchanged a word afterwards on the subject.

The sight of the prison-gate and the high wall was a dreary business. I thought of my horseback and the downs of Brighton; but congratulated myself, at all events, that I had come thither with a good consci-

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ence. After waiting in the prison-yard as long as if it had been the antiroom of a minister, I was at length ushered into the presence of the great man. He was in his parlour, which was decently furnished, and had a basin of broth before him, which he quitted on my appearance, and rose with much solemnity to meet me. He seemed about fifty years of age; had a white night-cap on, as if he was going to be hung; and a great red face, which looked ready to burst with blood. Indeed, he was not allowed by his physician to speak in a tone above a whisper. The first thing he said was, ‘Mister, I’d ha’ given a matter of a hundred pounds, that you had not come to this place—a hundred pounds!’ The emphasis which he laid on the word ‘hundred’ was enormous. I forget what I answered. I endeavoured, as usual, to make the best of things; but he recurred over and over again to the hundred pounds; and said he wondered, for his part, what the Government meant by sending me there, for the prison was not a prison fit for a gentleman, He often repeated this opinion afterwards, adding, with a peculiar nod of his head, ‘and Mister, they knows it.’ I said, that if a gentleman deserved to be sent to prison, he ought not to be treated with a greater nicety than any one else: upon which he corrected me, observing very properly, (though, as the phrase is, it was one word for the gentleman and two for his own apartments,) that a person who had been used to a better mode of lodging and living than ‘low people,’ was not treated with the same justice, if forced to live exactly as they did. I told him his observation was very true; which gave him a favourable opinion of my understanding: for I had many occasions of remarking, that, abstractedly considered, he looked upon nobody whomsoever as his superior, speaking even of the members of the Royal Family as persons whom he knew very well, and estimated no more than became him.

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One Royal Duke had lunched in his parlour, and another he had laid under some polite obligation. ‘They knows me,’ said he, ‘very well, Mister; and, Mister, I knows them.’ This concluding sentence he uttered with great particularity and precision. He was not proof, however, against a Greek Pindar, which he happened to light upon one day among my books. Its unintelligible character gave him a notion that he had got somebody to deal with, who might really know something which he did not. Perhaps the gilt leaves and red morocco binding had their share in the magic. The upshot was, that he always showed himself anxious to appear well with me, as a clever fellow, treating me with great civility on all occasions but one, when I made him very angry by disappointing him in a money amount. The Pindar was a mystery that staggered him. I remember very well, that giving me a long account one day of something connected with his business, he happened to catch with his eye the shelf that contained it, and whether he saw it or not, abruptly finished by observing, ‘But, Mister, you knows all these things as well as I do.’ Upon the whole, my new acquaintance was as strange a person as I ever met with. A total want of education, together with a certain vulgar acuteness, conspired to render him insolent and pedantic. Disease sharpened his tendency to violent fits of passion, which threatened to suffocate him; and then in his intervals of better health, he would issue forth, with his cock-up-nose and his hat on one side, as great a fop as a jockey. I remember his coming to my rooms, about the middle of my imprisonment, as if on purpose to insult over my ill health with the contrast of his own convalescence, putting his arms in a gay manner a-kimbo, and telling me I should never live to go out, whereas he was riding about as stout as ever, and had just been in the country. He died before I left prison. The word jail, in deference to the way in

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which it is sometimes spelt, he called gole; and Mr. Brougham he always spoke of as Mr. Bruffam. He one day apologized for this mode of pronunciation, or rather gave a specimen of his vanity and self-will, which will show the reader at once the high notions a jailer may entertain of himself: ‘I find,’ said he, ‘that they calls him Broom; but, Mister,’ (assuming a look from which there was to be no appeal,) ‘I calls him Bruffam!”

“Finding that my host did not think the prison fit for me, I asked if he would let me have an apartment in his house. He pronounced it impossible; which was a trick to enhance the price. I could not make an offer to please him; and he stood out so long, and, as he thought, so cunningly, that he subsequently overreached himself by his trickery; as the readers will see. His object was to keep me among the prisoners, till he could at once sicken me of the place, and get the permission of the magistrates to receive me into his house; which was a thing he reckoned upon as a certainty. He thus hoped to secure himself in all quarters; for his vanity was almost as strong as his avarice; he was equally fond of getting money in private, and of the approbation of the great men he had to deal with in public; and it so happened, that there had been no prisoner, above the poorest condition, before my arrival, with the exception of Colonel Despard. From abusing the prison, he then suddenly fell to speaking well of it, or rather of the room occupied by the Colonel; and said that another corresponding with it would make me a capital apartment. ‘To be sure,’ said he, ‘there is nothing but bare walls, and I have no bed to put in it.’ I replied, that of course I should not be hindered from having my own bed from home. He said, ‘No; and if it rains,’ observed he, ‘you have only to put up with want of light for a time.’ ‘What!’

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exclaimed I, ‘are there no windows?’ ‘Windows, Mister!’ cried he; ‘no windows in a prison of this sort; no glass, Mister; but excellent shutters.’

“On taking possession of my garret, I was treated with a piece of delicacy, which I never should have thought of finding in a prison. When I first entered its walls, I had been received by the under-jailer, a man who appeared an epitome of all that was forbidding in his office. He was short and very thick, had a hook nose, a great severe countenance, and a bunch of keys hanging on his arm. A friend once stopped short at sight of him, and said, in a melancholy tone, ‘And this is the jailer!’ Honest old Cave! thine outside would have been unworthy of thee, if upon farther acquaintance I had not found it a very hearty outside,—ay, and, in my eyes, a very good-looking one, and as fit to contain the milk of human kindness that was in thee, as the husk of a

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cocoa. Was, did I say? I hope it is in thee still; I hope thou art alive to read this paper, and to perform, as usual, a hundred kind offices, as exquisite in their way as they are desirable and unlooked for. To finish at once the character of this man,—I could never prevail on him to accept any acknowledgment of his kindness, greater than a set of tea-things, and a piece or two of old furniture which I could not well carry away. I had indeed the pleasure of leaving him in possession of a room I had papered; but this was a thing unexpected, and which neither of us had supposed could be done. Had I been a Prince, I would have forced on him a pension. Being a journalist, I made him accept an Examiner weekly, which, I trust, he still lives to relish his Sunday pipe with.

“This man, in the interval between my arrival and introduction to the head jailer, had found means to give me farther information respecting my new condition, and to express the interest he took in it. I thought little of his offers at the time. He behaved with the greatest air of deference to his principal; moving as fast as his body would allow him, to execute his least intimation; and holding the candle to him while he read, with an obsequious zeal. But he had spoken to his wife about me, and his wife I found to be as great a curiosity as himself. Both were more like the romantic jailers drawn in some of our modern plays, than real Horsemonger-lane palpabilities. The wife, in her person, was as light and fragile as the husband was sturdy. She had the nerves of a fine lady, and yet went through the most unpleasant duties with the patience of a martyr. Her voice and look seemed to plead for a softness like their own, as if a loud reply would have shattered her. Ill health had made her a Methodist, but this did not hinder her sympathy with an invalid who was none, or her love for her husband, who was as little

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of a saint as need be. Upon the whole, such an extraordinary couple, so apparently unsuitable, and yet so fitted for one another; so apparently vulgar on one side, and yet so naturally delicate on both; so misplaced in their situation, and yet for the good of others so admirably put there, I have never met with, before or since.

“My bed was shortly put up, and I slept in my new room. It was on an upper story, and stood in a corner of the quadrangle, on the right hand as you enter the prison-gate. The windows (which had now been accommodated with glass, in addition to their “excellent shutters”) were high up, and barred; but the room was large and airy, and there was a fireplace. It was designed for a common room for the prisoners on that story; but the cells were then empty. The cells were ranged on either side of the arcade, of which the story is formed, and the room opened at the end of it. At night-time the door was locked; then another on the top of the staircase, then another on the middle of the staircase, then a fourth at the bottom, a fifth that shut up the little yard belonging to that quarter, and how many more, before you got out of the gates, I forget: but I do not exaggerate when I say there were at least ten or eleven. The first night I slept there, I listened to them, one after the other, till the weaker part of my

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heart died within me. Every fresh turning of the key seemed a malignant insult to my love of liberty. I was alone, and away from my family; I, who have never slept from home above a dozen times in my life, and then only from necessity. Furthermore, the reader will bear in mind that I was ill. With a great flow of natural spirits, I was subject to fits of nervousness, which had latterly taken a more continued shape. I felt one of them coming on, and having learned to anticipate and break the force of it by sudden exercise, I took a stout walk of I dare say fourteen or fifteen miles, by pacing backwards and forwards for the space of three hours. This threw me into a state in which rest, for rest’s sake, became pleasant. I got hastily into bed, and slept without a dream till morning. By the way, I never dreamt of prison but twice all the time I was there, and my dream was the same on both occasions.

“It was on the second day of my imprisonment that I saw my wife, who could not come to me before. To say that she never reproached me for these and the like taxes upon our family prospects, is to say little. A world of comfort for me was in her face. There is a note in the fifth volume of my Spenser, which I was then reading, in these words:—February 4th, 1813.’ The line to which it refers is this:—

‘Much dearer be the things, which come through hard distresse.’

“I now applied to the magistrates for permission to have my wife and children with me, which was granted. Not so my request to move into the jailer’s house. Mr. Holme Sumner, on occasion of a petition from a subsequent prisoner, told the House of Commons, that my room had a view over the Surrey hills, and that I was very well content with it. I could not feel obliged to him for this postliminious piece of enjoy-

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ment, especially when I remembered that Mr. Holme Sumner had done all in his power to prevent my removal out of the room, precisely (as it appeared to us) because it looked upon nothing but the felons, and because I was not contented. In fact, you could not see out of the windows at all, without getting on a chair; and then, all that you saw was the miserable men, whose chains had been clanking from daylight. The perpetual sound of these chains wore upon my spirits, in a manner to which my state of health allowed me reasonably to object. The yard also in which I exercised was very small. The jailer proposed that I should be allowed to occupy apartments in his house, and walk occasionally in the prison garden; adding, that I should certainly die if I had not; and his opinion was seconded by that of the medical man. Mine host was sincere in this, if in nothing else. Telling us, one day, how warmly he had put it to the magistrates, and insisted that I should not survive, he turned round upon me, and, to the Doctor’s astonishment, added, ‘nor, Mister, will you.’ I believe it was the opinion of many; but Mr. Holme Sumner argued, perhaps, from his own sensations, which were sufficiently iron. Perhaps he concluded also, like a proper ministerialist, that if I did not think fit to flatter the magistrates a little, and play the courtier, my wants could not be very great. At all events, he came up one day with the rest of them, and after bowing as well as he could to my wife, and piteously pinching the cheek of an infant in her arms, went down and did all he could to prevent our being comfortably situated.

The Doctor then proposed that I should be removed into the prison infirmary; and this proposal was granted. Infirmary had, I confess, an awkward sound even to my ears. I fancied a room shared with other sick persons, not the best fitted for companions; but the good-natured

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doctor (his name was Dixon) undeceived me.* The infirmary was divided into four wards, with as many small rooms attached to them. The two upper wards were occupied, but the two on the ground floor had never been used: and one of these, not very providently (for I had not yet learned to think of money) I turned into a noble room. I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling coloured with clouds and sky; the barred windows were screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side the water. I took a pleasure, when a stranger knocked at the door, to see him come in and stare about him. The surprise on issuing from the Borough, and passing through the avenues of a jail, was dramatic. Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room except in a fairy tale.

“But I had another surprise; which was a garden. There was a little yard outside, the room, railed off from another belonging to the neighbouring ward. This yard I shut in with green palings, adorned it with a trellis, bordered it with a thick bed of earth from a nursery, and even contrived to have a grass-plot. The earth I filled with flowers and young trees. There was an apple-tree, from which we managed to get a pudding the second year. As to my flowers, they were allowed to be perfect. A poet from Derbyshire† told me he had seen no such heart’s-ease. I bought the ‘Parnaso Italiano’ while in prison, and used often to think of a passage in it, while looking at this miniature piece of horticulture:—

* I may venture to speak of him with this grateful epithet, for I verily believe he thought me dying, and he never interchanged a word with me except on the matter in question.

† Thomas Moore; with whom and Lord Byron I was too angry, when I wrote this article, to mention them as visitors of me by name.

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————————Mio picciol orto, A me sei vigna, e campo, e selva, e prato.—Baldi.

————————My little garden, To me thou ’rt vineyard, field, and meadow, and wood.

Here I wrote and read in fine weather, sometimes under an awning. In autumn, my trellises were hung with scarlet runners, which added to the flowery investment. I used to shut my eyes in my arm-chair, and affect to think myself hundreds of miles off. But my triumph was in issuing forth of a morning. A wicket out of the garden led into the large one belonging to the prison. The latter was only for vegetables; but it contained a cherry-tree, which I saw twice in blossom.   ***