e confined for large
sums may be deemed the most wretched and forlorn, because they
have generally fallen from a sphere of life where they had little
acquaintance with necessity, and were altogether ignorant of the arts
by which the severities of indigence are alleviated. On the other hand,
those of the lower class of mankind, whose debts are small in proportion
to the narrowness of their former credit, have not the same delicate
feelings of calamity: they are inured to hardship, and accustomed to
the labour of their hands, by which, even in a prison, they can earn
a subsistence: their reverse of fortune is not so great, nor the
transition so affecting: their sensations are not delicate; nor are
they, like their betters in misfortune, cut off from hope, which is the
wretch's last comfort. It is the man of sentiment and sensibility, who,
in this situation, is overwhelmed with a complication of misery and
ineffable distress: the mortification of his pride, his ambition
blasted, his family undone, himself deprived of liberty, reduced from
opulence to extreme want, from the elegancies of life to the most
squalid and frightful scenes of poverty and affliction; divested of
comfort, destitute of hope, and doomed to linger out a wretched being in
the midst of insult, violence, riot, and uproar; these are reflections
so replete with horror, as to render him, in all respects, the most
miserable object on the face of the earth. He, alas! though possessed
of talents that might have essentially served and even adorned society,
while thus restrained in prison, and affected in mind, can exert no
faculty, nor stoop to any condescension, by which the horrors of his
fate might be assuaged: he scorns to execute the lowest offices of
menial services, particularly in attending those who are the objects of
contempt or abhorrence; he is incapable of exercising any mechanic art,
which might afford a happy though a scanty independence: shrunk
within his dismal cell, surrounded by haggard poverty, and her gaunt
attendants, hollow-eyed famine, shivering cold, and wan disease, he
wildly casts his eyes around; he sees the tender partner of his heart
weeping in silent woe; he hears his helpless babes clamorous for
sustenance; he feels himself the importunate cravings of human nature,
which he cannot satisfy; and groans with all the complicated pangs of
internal anguish, horror, and despair. These are not the fictions of
idle fancy, but real pictures,