By permission of Mr. W. E. Gray, 92 Queen's Road, Bayswater]

MAIN ENTRANCE DOOR OF NEWGATE PRISON

[To face p. 19

GOSSIP ON THE LAST OF NEWGATE

It is among my idlest fancies that I was the last person in the condemned cell of Newgate. One of the last persons I certainly was. I sat in the naked cell alone, on the little wooden bed where murderers had slept or tossed. The silence was as deep as in any hour of the twenty-four it ever could have been in that place; and out of the silence came the great clock of St. Paul's, flinging over the City its melodious noon. I tried, as in such a situation one vainly does, to gather into my heart the thoughts of the men and women awaiting death who had listened for the beating of the clock of St. Paul's every quarter of an hour during the hours of three weeks. The effort failed me, as of course it would; and I went out from the condemned cell into the sun-it was July, and the sky was splendid-and looked at the battered roof of the shed of the gallows, on which some pigeons of the prison had perched.

Surely the strangest sight in London was Newgate on the eve of demolition. The prison of a thousand years, its evil destinies fulfilled,

its power and its terrors fallen, stood a mock to the curious beholder. I climbed an iron stair, paced one echoing corridor and another, peered into vacant cells. I descended; and, standing again at the threshold of one of the condemned cells, observed how short a journey the murderer took from his bed to the scaffold. I walked the dark well yard where murderers had walked morning and afternoon, and saw in one corner the staff from which the black flag floated as the bolt was drawn in the trap-door of the gallows. Wickets and armoured gates were opened for me; I went by dusky passages into stone-paved courts empty as a desert, where the sun blazed on desolation. One spot alone was sunless; the passage-way roofed in with iron bars, ironically known as "Birdcage Walk." It was the burialground of Newgate. In the flags and on the walls initial letters were rudely cut; the scant epitaphs of many victims of the noose. burial-ground led straight into the Old Bailey; and the murderer returning from the court with his sentence in his ears trod the grave that would presently receive him in a shroud of quicklime.

This

It is twelve years since I strolled amid these ghostly scenes, and of the sorrow that was Newgate no brick remains.

During the better part of a thousand years a prison of some mark stood here. For centuries

it was prison and gate in one. Stow names it the fifth principal gate in the City wall, and the mediæval Newgate was probably more gate than prison. For the matter of this, the celebrated keep, which was certainly older than the Bastille, looked far more imposing from without than from within. Viewed from the Old Bailey it had all the air of the fine old-fashioned fortress-prison, and seemed enormous; inside, it was no such grand affair, and the space devoted to "felons and trespassers was often utterly inadequate.

At different epochs prisons have been built on very different plans. In the Middle Ages they were raised on the great and solid scale : walls high and thick, doors plated, bolts and bars enormous. Add some genuine dungeons, and an oubliette or so (medieval Newgate was not without its oubliettes), and every reasonable need was met. That the prison should be a wholesome place to live in was scarcely thought of. Most of the older prisons were familiar enough with fever; and Newgate in this respect had a splendidly atrocious record. But at the date of which I speak (and long after) prisons were not always designed as places to live in. The "elaborate system of incarceration" had hardly then been invented in England, where, speaking at large, prisons were but "the antechambers of the pillory and the scaffold."

We build them nowadays in another fashion.