Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/111

Rh of cells within. Nothing could be more funereal than the appearance of these prisons, where spiders and justice spun their webs, and where John Howard, that ray of light, had not yet penetrated. Like the old Gehenna of Brussels, they might well have been designated Treurenberg,—"the house of tears." Before such buildings, at once so savage and inhospitable, men felt the same distress that the ancient navigators suffered before the hell of slaves mentioned by Plautus,—islands of creaking chains, ferricrepiditæ insulæ,—when they passed near enough to hear the clank of the fetters.

Southwark Jail, an old place of exorcisms and torture, was originally used solely for the imprisonment of sorcerers, as was proved by two verses engraved on a defaced stone at the foot of the wicket:—

lines which draw a subtle, delicate distinction between the demoniac and the man possessed of a devil. At the bottom of this inscription, nailed flat against the wall, was a stone ladder, originally of wood, but which had been changed into stone by being buried in earth of petrifying quality at a place called Apsley Gowis, near Woburn Abbey.

The prison of Southwark, now demolished, opened on two streets, between which, as a gate, it formerly served as a means of communication. It had two doors,—in the large street a door used by the authorities; and in the lane the criminals' door, used by the rest of the living and by the dead also, because when a prisoner in the jail died, it was through that doorway his body was carried out,—a liberation not to be despised. Death is release into infinity. It was by this doorway that Gwynplaine had been taken into the prison.