lanthropists. It has lain in the heart of this great city like some foul and undrained marsh, into which all the waters of corruption were poured. It has ever been a fertile nursery of crime. From within its walls physical as well as moral contagion has issued, and spread disease in most noxious and aggravated forms. The jaildistemper has more than once struck down the functionaries who appeared at the Old Bailey sessions, as well as the prisoners themselves.

Among all who have labored to alleviate the miseries of Newgate, the honored name of Mrs. Fry must not be overlooked. To give a proper idea of the state of the prison when she began her labors would require statements unfit for our pages; but the following extract from Mrs. Fry's evidence before a committee of the house of commons, in 1818, will give the reader a faint notion of the moral courage and patience which this excellent woman must have possessed to enable her to pursue her selfchosen avocation :

"About what time was it when you first visited Newgate, and established a committee of ladies to visit the female prisoners?—It is rather more than a year. It is rather more than a year since I first established a school for the children of the convicts; I did not undertake the care of the convicts till about two months afterward; their children first attracted my attention.

"Have the goodness to relate what you did with regard to the children. In visiting the prison, which I had been occasionally in the habit of doing for several years, I very much lamented to see children so much exposed among those very wicked women, and I understood that the first language they lisped was generally oaths or very bad expressions; it therefore struck me, how important it would be to separate them from the convicts, and to have them put in a small apartment by themselves, under the care of a schoolmistress, provided it met with the approbation of the women themselves, for I always approved acting in concert with them in whatever I did. I represented my views to the mothers, and they with tears in their eyes said, 'Oh, how thankful we would be for it;' for they knew so much the miseries of vice, that they hoped their children would never be trained up in it. It was in our first visits to the school, where we some of us attended almost every day, that we were witnesses to the dreadful proceedings that went forward on the female side of the prison-the begging, swearing, gaming, fighting, singing, dancing. The scenes are too bad to be described, so that we did not think it suitable to admit young persons with us."

"As a proof of the want of classification," Mrs. Fry says, in another portion of her evidence, women who came in weeping over their deviations-some small deviation perhaps by the time of their trial or dismissal would sometimes become so barefaced and wicked as to laugh at the very same things, and to be fitted for almost any crime. I understand, that before we went into the prison it was considered a reproach to be a modest woman."

We have already said that the prison is a very different place from what it was; let us, therefore, venture in. We shall find the officers, from the governor downward, civil, attentive, and obliging. Ascending a few steps, and expressing a wish to see the boys' ward, we are conducted through a dark labyrinthine passage, and, on mounting a stair, the merry shouts that we hear seem to proceed from the playground of a school. Here are two rooms-one the schoolroom by day and sleepingroom by night, the other the day-room. In the latter, about fifteen or sixteen boys are tumbling about at play. A well-known voice calls out, "Stand around!" but the quick eyes of the youngsters tell them that the strangers are not official visiters; and they therefore come forward, bobbing their heads, or rather pulling them down by the front locks, and boisterously elbowing each other as they fall into line. An almost indistinct murmur, however, lets them know the extent of their discretion, and they stand quiet. "That boy," pointing to a child of about ten or eleven years of age, “is under sentence of death!" In a moment, the little creature feels himself the object of greatest importance in the group, and his look evinces it.

"Does the course taken with young offenders operate as a punishment sufficient in its nature to deter them from crime?-Certainly not. A boy affects to cry at the bar, and his mother or some relation will cry with him, and the judge gives him a little lecture, and sends him home; or sometimes they inflict a whipping, but that is made a matter of laughter among these young rascals after becoming inured to a jail." "I think, if the boy is under twelve years of age, when the mind is hardly

formed, it is too much to send him for trial at the Old Bailey, and thus, whether found guilty or not, consign him to infamy for life."

Let us pass now from the boys' ward to that of the men's. Here they are lounging about the day-room; but at the command of "Stand around!" they fall into line for inspection with a quieter promptness than did the boys-one or two with a sullen scowl, some with an easy indifference, others with a half-kind of smile, as if not so much accustomed to the discipline. They are mostly young men, from sixteen years of age to twenty-five. The greater part of these individuals have probably come through the first part of their apprenticeship in crime, and are now rising into life with seared hearts, depraved and almost irreclaimable habits, and their intellectual powers exercised in nothing but the dexterity and meanness of theft.

The plan of Newgate is quadrangular. The untried prisoners are kept separate from the tried, and the young from the old. It was built originally without sleeping cells for separate confinement, except the condemned cells: the number of nightrooms is thirty-three, in each of which there are at night from fifteen to thirty persons; the number of day-rooms, or wards, is ten; one hundred and twenty-nine sleeping cells might be got by dividing these large rooms, but four hundred and sixty-two additional cells would still be wanting, for which the prison affords no

space.

CHAPTER XXIV.

LAW COURTS.

THE law courts are somewhat scattered about London. The superior courts of common law and equity are indeed to be found together at Westminster hall; and their vicinity to the houses of the legislature, as well as the hall itself, gives them a fitting air of propriety, and even of dignity. But, on the other hand, if the attraction of a license or a legacy induces the stranger to inquire for the ecclesiastical courts, he must literally search for Doctors' commons. Both Westminster hall and Doctors' commons are in the neighborhood of our two great ecclesiastical edifices-the abbey and St. Paul's. But even when the stranger is in St. Paul's churchyard, he must ask for Doctors' commons! He must seek for it in those narrow streets that run down the slope of the hill on which stands the mighty pile-too near us, hemmed in, and clustered round, to make us feel sufficiently the influence of masses of stone heaped together by the hand of genius. Then the court of bankruptcy must be sought for in Basinghall street, in the "city," and the court for the relief of insolvents in Portugal street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. The courts of requests-courts which can give summary relief in civil actions for small amounts-are, properly enough, distributed in different parts of London. These courts are interesting places-the vast number of cases perpetually arising in such a population as that of London fills them with business. The Marshalsea and palace courts are in Scotland yard, near Charing cross. These courts have jurisdiction over all personal actions arising within the verge of the palace, that is, within twelve miles of Whitehall, excepting the " London.

city" of

It is not alone from considerations connected with the past that Westminster hall is an object of interest. Here is the head and fountain of those judicial institutions under which England has shot up to greatness-institutions planned at a distant time, by a rude people, under widely-different circumstances from those in which we live-institutions which administer laws full of apparent anomalies, but which have furnished the form and pattern of judicial institutions now incorporated with the habits and feelings of millions of people in some of the fairest parts of the globe. English forms of law and judicial administration prevail throughout a great nation, whose dominion stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans; they are to be found in her colonies in every latitude; they are taking root in the empire rising in the southern seas.

The first three courts as we enter the hall are, the king's bench, the common pleas, and the exchequer. These courts issued out of one, and, in the lapse of time, they have come to be, for nearly all practical intents and purposes, one court again. The king's bench, indeed, retains a portion of its ancient superiority in its jurisdiction over all inferior tribunals-it can bring a criminal from any inferior court in England into its own, and there deal with him as law and justice may demand. In the exchequer also the judges of which are termed barons, and the chief the lord chief baron-all revenue cases are still tried; but the great mass of all civil suits may be brought indiscriminately into any of the three courts, and the fifteen judges (until 1830 there were only twelve) are the head expounders and administrators of the statute and common law, dispensing it in their courts at Westminster hall, and over the entire kingdom in their circuits.

There are four terms in each year during which the courts are open at Westminster hall. These are Hilary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas terms The three courts-king's bench, common pleas, and exchequer-determine questions of law during term time. The sittings after term are generally employed in deciding causes before special and common juries. The "city" of London has the privilege of having its nisi prius, or jury, cases tried at Guildhall.

The "high court of chancery" is divided into three courts-the court of the lord chancellor, the court of the master of the rolls, and the court of the vice-chancellor. The special interference of the king, as the fountain of justice, was frequently sought against the decisions of the courts of law, where they worked injustice; and also in matters which were not cognizable in the ordinary courts, or in which, from the maintenance or protection afforded to his adversary, the petitioner was unable to obtain redress. The jurisdiction with which the chancellor is invested had its origin in this portion of discretionary power, which was retained by the king on the establishment of courts of justice. The exercise of those powers in modern times is scarcely, if at all, less circumscribed and hemmed in by rule and precedent than the strict jurisdiction of the courts of law. The decisions of former lord-chancellors, and the customs and practices which sprung up in the courts, have created a body of equity law in very much the same way that the body of the common law was created. And thus the law of England is divided into two great branches of common law and equity law, each having their forms, rules, and precedents, according to which the judges regulate their decisions. The court of exchequer has what is termed its equity side as well as its common law side.

Next in rank to the lord chancellor in the court of chancery is the master of the rolls; he is chief of the masters in chancery, and derives his name from being keeper or guardian of the chancery rolls or records. During term-time the chancery judges sit at Westminster hall; on other occasions, the lord chancellor in Lincoln's Inn hall, the vice-chancellor in a court near it, the master of the rolls in his court in Chancery lane, and one of the barons of the court of exchequer, as an equity judge, in Gray's Inn hall.

The court of bankruptcy was established in the beginning of the reign of William IV. Its name implies the nature of its business. It is subdivided into three courts the court of review, with a chief judge and two puisne judges. The commissioners of bankruptcy are six in number.

The court for the relief of insolvent debtors is presided over by three judges, termed commissioners, one of whom sits twice a week in London the whole year through, and they also make circuits over England.

We have hardly space to enter into any detail respecting the ecclesiastical courts. Their jurisdiction takes cognizance of wills, and administration of personal property -of causes for separation and nullity of marriage, of suits respecting church-rates and churches, of cases respecting church discipline, connected either with clergy or laity, &c., &c. The advocates practising or presiding in these courts are an incorporated body, forming a college, the number being limited. They are all doctors of law. A proctor is an ecclesiastical attorney or solicitor.

In Doctors' commons is also the admiralty court. Its criminal business is given to the central criminal court, but it has an extensive jurisdiction in civil admiralty

causes.

The courts of law can not be dismissed without slightly noticing the metropolitan prisons for debtors connected with them. The king's bench prison lies across the river in Southwark. It occupies an extensive space of ground; and the tall and

dusky walls that surround it give it a very gloomy external appearance. But inside it has the appearance of being not a prison, but one of those prison-looking places, a fortified town. It contains shops, stalls, and public-houses, for the supply of its somewhat numerous population. This prison, and that of the Fleet, may be termed the head prisons of England for the incarceration of debtors-for debtors can procure themselves to be removed (at some expense) from any other prison to either of these two. Each of these also has a certain space outside the prison, under the name of Rules, in which debtors who can afford to pay certain fees, and give security, are allowed to reside-and it may be easily imagined that those who can do so are not always to be found precisely within the precincts of the Rules. It has been long a maxim of the common law that a debtor must answer with his body, if he can not or will not with his purse-but we are doubtless drawing nearer to a better .time, and to a more humane-nay, to a more self-interested application and understanding of the law of debtor and creditor. The king's bench prison is the place of confinement where the court of king's bench has been in the habit of committing its prisoners, such as those guilty of "contempt" toward it, and many of those who have been sentenced by it to imprisonment for libel.

The Marshalsea, or palace court, has also a prison for debtors in Southwark, which, until within these few years past, was a shocking place of confinement. It has been re-edified and improved.

The Fleet prison lies in Farringdon street, near the bottom of Ludgate hill. This prison was erected in the place of the old Fleet prison, which was destroyed in the riots of 1780, and which was so notorious for its "Fleet marriages." The Fleet is the prison to which the courts of chancery, common pleas, and exchequer, commit for "contempt."