put to it to make a drab of her. Polly was no saint, but neither was she in the least a libertine. Among her suitors was Charles, the third Duke of Bolton, of the Winchester branch of the Powletts. With this nobleman, at the end of the first run of The Beggar's Opera, Polly allied herself, albeit in the left-handed way, for there was a duchess in the offing. She died, and then Polly's duke made her an honourable woman, and it was the most notable thing his Grace ever did. Lavinia Fenton, Gay's first Polly Peachum, the nobody's child of an ale-house or a coffee-house, became Duchess of Bolton, and was the second lady of "the" profession to marry into the peerage. Dance's Newgate was gutted in the Gordon Riots. The poet Crabbe, just come up to town, happened somehow to be in the thick of it. He saw Lord George himself, "a lively-looking young man," in a coach drawn by the crowd, "bowing as he passed along." He notes "ten or twelve of the mob getting to the top of the debtors' prison, whilst it was burning, to halloo; they appeared rolled in black smoke mixed with sudden bursts of fire-like Milton's infernals." On the spot next day was Dr. Johnson, who saw "the Protestants plundering the Sessions House at the Old Bailey. There were not, I believe, a hundred; but they did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, without trepida tion; as men lawfully employed, in full day." In the end the military were called out, and a good deal of blood was shed before the riots were got under. Many of the prisoners released by the mob returned to Newgate of their own accord. Lord George Gordon was arrested, lodged in the Tower, tried for high treason, and acquitted. This was in 1780. Six years later Lord George, in a pamphlet called libellous, took up the case of some Newgate prisoners, and was again arrested and put on trial. He was tried at the same time on a charge of libelling Marie Antoinette, found guilty on both counts, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment in Newgate, where he lay until the gaol fever accounted for him. The new gaol seems to have been pretty nearly as cramped as the old one. The tried and the untried, young and old, were herded altogether; 66 there was no separation even for the women under sentence of death, who lived in a common and perpetually crowded ward." Male prisoners awaiting death were confined in the new pressyard, and "made their souls" by hard drinking. To the murderer's last supper was sometimes bidden the chaplain, who tippled with the company; and on the Sunday before an execution the condemned of both sexes, seated in an open pew with a coffin in their midst, composed a show for a fashionable congregation. Such was the state of Newgate when, in 1813, D Mrs. Fry paid her first visit to the women's side. Elizabeth Fry's crusade in Newgate has covered her name with a glory that endures. John Howard had lain three-and-twenty years in the grave, and since his there had been no articulate voice for prisoners and captives. His work, indeed, seemed almost to have perished; the Newgate of the early nineteenth century was hideously famed as "hell above earth." From the unmartial tents of Quakerdom came Elizabeth Fry, her Bible in her hand, and gained a shining victory there. 66 The most celebrated Quakeress in history was born in 1780-just ten years, by the way, before Howard's death. Her father, John Gurney, a very Gaius in his hospitality," was a Norwich banker, whose family had been of the Society of Friends since George Fox's time. John Gurney married Catherine Bell, whose beautiful portrait is to be seen in Gainsborough's picture of Priscilla and Edward Wakefield with Catherine Bell. Elizabeth, tall and statuesque and of splendid mould, showed all her mother's beauty. She was duly, as the phrase goes, converted. This momentous event happened at the Quakers' meeting-house on a Sunday morning, when Elizabeth, in purple boots laced with scarlet, made one of a row of seven charming sisters in the gallery, and listened in tears to the sermon of a young American. "From that day her |