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 executions for debts under fifty pounds; but they soon get arrested again—often for sums not much more than fifty pence—and, being laid up in hold, starve and rot miserably. There are debtors in Newgate, there are debtors in Ludgate; in the Clink, the Borough, Poultry, and Wood Street Compters, the Marshalsea, the King's Bench, and at Westminster Gate houses, besides innumerable spunging houses, or "spider's webs," with signs like inns, such as the "Pied Bull" in the Borough, and the "Angel" in Cursitor Street. Little boy Hogarth will have much to observe about prisons and prisoners when he is grown to be a man. Many Alsatians take refuge in the Southwark Mint, likewise, and by the same statute deprived of its sanctuary; but which, in some underhand manner—perhaps from there being only one bridge into Southwark, and that rotten—contrives to evade it till late in the reign of George I. Coining flourishes thenceforth more than ever in the Mint; the science of Water Lane being added to the experience of St. Mary Overy, and both being aided, perhaps, by the ancient numismatic traditions of the place. More of the Alsatians are caught up by alguazils of the criminal law, and, after a brief sojourn at Newgate, "patibulate" at Justice Hall, and eventually make that sad journey up Holborn Hill in a cart, stopping for a refresher at the Bowl House, St. Giles's Pound—alas! it is not always staying for his liquor that will save the saddler of Bawtree from hanging—and so end at Tyburn. Some, too, go a-begging in Lincoln's Inn, and manufacture some highly remunerative mutilations and ulcers. And some, a very few, tired of the draff and husks in Alsatia, go back to their fathers, and are forgiven. In this hard world, whose members only see the application of parables that teach us love and mercy on Sundays, it is easier to find prodigals to repent than fathers to forgive. But for our hope and comfort, that parable has another and a higher meaning.

Alsatia was linked hand in glove with the Court of the Restoration. 'Twas often but a chapel of ease to the backstairs of Whitehall, and many a great courtier, ruined at basset with the king and his beauties the night before, found his level on the morrow in this vile slum-playing butt, playing cards on a broken pair of bellows. But now, 1697, Whitehall itself is gone. The major part of the enormous pile went by fire in '91; now the rest, or all but Holbein's Gate, and the blood-stained Banqueting-house, has fallen a prey to the "devouring element."

Whitehall, then, has gone by the board. In vain now to look for Horn Chamber, or Cabinet Room, or the stone gallery that flanked Privy Garden, where the imperious, depraved Louise de la Quérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived amid "French tapestry, Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braseners, all of massive silver, and out of number." All these things, worthy Master Evelyn, of Sayes Court, Deptford (who about this time has let his said mansion and ground to Peter Velikè, czar of Muscovy, and thinks him but an evil tenant, with his uncouth, uncleanly Russian fashions, his driving of wheelbarrows through neatly-trimmed