ill. At home, he wrenched off knockers, played practical jokes, drank

more stout, ate oysters, chaffed bar-maidens, and called for brandy and water continually. He was loud in his dress and in his voice; he was insolent, caddish, and offensive in his manners. Generally, one thinks, he would end his career in Whitecross Street, or the Fleet, or the Queen’s Bench. Doubtless, however, there are still among us old gentlemen who now sit at church on Sunday with venerable white hair, among their children and grandchildren, and while the voice of the preacher rises and falls, their memory wanders back to the days when they danced and sang with the grisettes, when they wrenched the knockers, when they went from the theatre to the Coal Cellar, and from the Coal Cellar to the Finish; and came home with unsteady step and light purse in the grey of the morning.

The Debtors’ Prison belonged chiefly to the great middle-class. Before them stalked always a grisly spectre, called by some Insolvency and by others Bankruptcy. This villainous ghost seized its victims by the collar and haled them within the walls of a Debtors’ Prison, where it made them abandon hope, and abide there till the day of death. Everybody is familiar with the inside of the Fleet, the Queen’s Bench, the Marshalsea, and Whitecross Street. They are all pulled down now, and the only way to get imprisoned for debt is to incur contempt of court, for which Holloway is the reward. But what a drop from the humours of the Queen’s Bench, with its drinking, tobacco, singing, and noisy revelry, to the solitary cell of Holloway Prison! The Debtors’ Prison is gone, and the world is the better for its departure. Nowadays the ruined betting-man, the rake, the sharper, the profligate, the fraudulent bankrupt, have no prison where they can carry on their old excesses again, though in humbler way. They go down--below the surface--out of sight, and what they do, and how they fare, nobody knows, and very few care.