t the common felons. He speaks of this
prison, with its thieves, murderers, and prostitutes, its over-crowded
apartments and loathsome cells, as "a hell upon earth." In a closet,
adjoining the room where he was lodged, lay for several days the
quartered bodies of Phillips, Tongue, and Gibbs, the leaders of the Fifth
Monarchy rising, frightful and loathsome, as they came from the bloody
hands of the executioners! These ghastly remains were at length obtained
by the friends of the dead, and buried. The heads were ordered to be
prepared for setting up in different parts of the city. Read this grim
passage of description:--

"I saw the heads when they were brought to be boiled. The hangman
fetched them in a dirty basket, out of some by-place, and, setting them
down among the felons, he and they made sport of them. They took them by
the hair, flouting, jeering, and laughing at them; and then giving them
some ill names, boxed them on their ears and cheeks; which done, the
hangman put them into his kettle, and parboiled them with bay-salt and
cummin-seed: that to keep them from putrefaction, and this to keep off
the fowls from seizing upon them. The whole sight, as well that of the
bloody quarters first as this of the heads afterwards, was both frightful
and loathsome, and begat an abhorrence in my nature."

At the next session of the municipal court at the Old Bailey, Ellwood
obtained his discharge. After paying a visit to "my Master Milton," he
made his way to Chalfont, the home of his friends the Penningtons, where
he was soon after engaged as a Latin teacher. Here he seems to have had
his trials and temptations. Gulielma Springette, the daughter of
Pennington's wife, his old playmate, had now grown to be "a fair woman of
marriageable age," and, as he informs us, "very desirable, whether regard
was had to her outward person, which wanted nothing to make her
completely comely, or to the endowments of her mind, which were every way
extraordinary, or to her outward fortune, which was fair." From all
which, we are not surprised to learn that "she was secretly and openly
sought for by many of almost every rank and condition." "To whom,"
continues Thomas, "in their respective turns, (till he at length came for
whom she was reserved,) she carried herself with so much evenness of
temper, such courteous freedom, guarded by the strictest modesty, that as
it gave encouragement or ground of hope to none, so neither did it