. 8364.

LVIII.

A PRISON

Is the grave of the living,[80] where they are shut up from the world and
their friends; and the worms that gnaw upon them their own thoughts and
the jaylor. A house of meagre looks and ill smells, for lice, drink, and
tobacco are the compound. Pluto's court was expressed from this fancy; and
the persons are much about the same parity that is there. You may ask, as
Menippus in Lucian, which is Nireus, which Thersites, which the beggar,
which the knight;--for they are all suited in the same form of a kind of
nasty poverty. Only to be out at elbows is in fashion here, and a great
indecorum not to be thread-bare. Every man shews here like so many wracks
upon the sea, here the ribs of a thousand pound, here the relicks of so
many mannors, a doublet without buttons; and 'tis a spectacle of more pity
than executions are. The company one with the other is but a vying of
complaints, and the causes they have to rail on fortune and fool
themselves, and there is a great deal of good fellowship in this. They are
commonly, next their creditors, most bitter against the lawyers, as men
that have had a great stroke in assisting them hither. Mirth here is
stupidity or hard-heartedness, yet they feign it sometimes to slip
melancholy, and keep off themselves from themselves, and the torment of
thinking what they have been. Men huddle up their life here as a thing of
no use, and wear it out like an old suit, the faster the better; and he
that deceives the time best, best spends it. It is the place where new
comers are most welcomed, and, next them, ill news, as that which extends
their fellowship in misery, and leaves few to insult:--and they breath
their discontents more securely here, and have their tongues at more
liberty than abroad. Men see here much sin and much calamity; and where
the last does not mortify, the other hardens; as those that are worse
here, are desperately worse, and those from whom the horror of sin is
taken off and the punishment familiar: and commonly a hard thought passes
on all that come from this school; which though it teach much wisdom, it
is too late, and with danger: and it is better be a fool than come here to
learn it.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] "A prison is a graue to bury men aliue, and a place wherein a man for
halfe a yeares experience may learne more law then he can at Westminster
for an hundred pound." Mynshul's _Essays and Characters of a Prison_. 4to.
1618.