A PRISON.

It should be Christ’s Hospital, for most of your wealthy citizens are good benefactors to it; and yet it can hardly be so, because so few in it are kept upon alms.  Charity’s house and this are built many miles asunder.  One thing notwithstanding is here praiseworthy, for men in this persecution cannot choose but prove good Christians, in that they are a kind of martyrs, and suffer for the truth.  And yet it is so cursed a piece of land that the son is ashamed to be his father’s heir in it.  It is an infected pest-house all the year long; the plague-sores of the law are the diseases here hotly reigning.  The surgeons are atomies and pettifoggers, who kill more than they cure.  Lord have mercy upon us, may well stand over these doors, for debt is a most dangerous and catching city pestilence.  Some take this place for the walks in Moorfields (by reason the madmen are so near), but the crosses here and there are not alike.  No, it is not half so sweet an air.  For it is the dunghill of the law, upon which are thrown the ruins of gentry, and the nasty heaps of voluntary decayed bankrupts, by which means it comes to be a perfect medal of the iron age, since nothing but jingling of keys, rattling of shackles, bolts, and grates are here to be heard.  It is the horse of Troy, in whose womb are shut up all the mad Greeks that were men of action.  The nullum vacuum (unless in prisoners’ bellies) is here truly to be proved.  One excellent effect is wrought by the place itself, for the arrantest coward breathing, being posted hither, comes in three days to an admirable stomach.  Does any man desire to learn music; every man here sings “Lachrymse” at first sight, and is hardly out.  He runs division upon every note, and yet (to their commendations be it spoken) none of them for all that division do trouble the Church.  They are no Anabaptists; if you ask under what horizon this climate lies, the Bermudas and it are both under one and the same height.  And whereas some suppose that this island like that is haunted with devils, it is not so.  For those devils so talked of and feared are none else but hoggish jailors.  Hither you need not sail, for it is a ship of itself; the master’s side is the upper deck.  They in the common jail lie under hatches, and help to ballast it.  Intricate cases are the tacklings, executions the anchors, capiases the cables, chancery bills the huge sails, a long term the mast, law the helm, a judge the pilot, a counsel the purser, an attorney the boatswain, his Setting clerk the swabber, bonds the waves, outlawries gust, the verdict of juries rough wind, extents the knocks that split all in pieces.  Or if it be not a ship, yet this and a ship differ not much in the building; the one is moving misery, the other a standing.  The first is seated on a spring, the second on piles.  Either this place is an emblem of a bawdy house, or a bawdy house of it; for nothing is to be seen in any room but scurvy beds and bare walls.  But (not so much to dishonour it) it is an university of poor scholars, in which three arts are chiefly studied:  to pray, to curse, and to write letters.