FLEET PRISON.
A.stonG the striking revolutions of great towns, are the changes which take place in the destinations of buildings, streets, or wider localities. A chapel becomes a senate-house ; a royal palace a bridewell ; the resort of courtiers a haunt for street-beggars and pickpockets ; the site of the stocks is occupied by the official re- sidence of the chief magistrate. A large town of any decent antiquity presents a very_puzzle of associations. The London of this century and the London of one or two centuries ago are the same and not the same. Were spirits permitted to revisit this world, the disembodied Members of the Long Parliament, who used to take their recreation in Tothill Fields, would be much astray among the squalid and noisome labyrinth of courts which now occupy them ; and some fifty years hence, when the Pimlico Palace is surrounded on all sides by a new West-end, the ghosts of the respectable characters who used to keep fighting-dogs, for the amusement of the Westminster scholars, in the purlieus of the sanctuary, would be lost and bewildered amid fashionable cir- cuses, squares, and terraces. The environs of the Fleet Prison have had their share of these changes ; and now the Prison itself—the citadel, the last refuge of old associations—has been assaulted and carried. When the Highland bard passed by Balclutha and saw its walls desolate, the thistle waving its lonely beard and the fox looking out of the window, the sense of desertion impressed by these symptoms was scarcely greater than what is awakened by beholding the Fleet Prison undergoing the process of demolition. Its foxes—and its share of human foxes has been ample—have been removed ; nor Could any...loiterer of the pack well look out of the window, for windows in its external wall it has none. But to see its blank visage beplastered with bills of sale, the workmen unroofing the porter's lodge—to catch a glimpse, through the no longer closely- fastened door, of iron-bars and spikes now useless—to watch curious passengers entering and issuing freely at the bidding of a faint curiosity—all bespeak an edifice " dying away from human thoughts and purposes."
Prisons would seem to have a liking for sociality as well as hu- man beings : else how can we account for the cluster of them gathered so neighbourly on the banks of the Fleet !—Newgate, and the Fleet, and Giltspur Compter ; and though Ludgate has
ceased to wall in the debtor, its memory survives. A "De ancholyrecord is the history of that region—both of its caged felons and political delinquents or martyrs, heretics or martyrs of a purer faith caged within, and the future gaol-birds in training, in every nook and cranny, between and around the walls of the fastnesses. There have been times when men almost seemed to invert the order of nature and apply the inside of the prison to uses for which the outside was alone appropriate. A prison never was meant to be a habitation for men so gentle and so good as the first Quakers, who were sometimes confined in the Fleet ; and still less was it meant as a depot for smuggled goods, which it actually became for a considerable time under the favouring auspices of the wretched police-regulations in the early part of the reign of George the Third. Incidents like these mark, more strongly than weightier political events, the intolerant spirit or imbecile government of a nation in a particular age. And the cele- brated Fleet marriages are possibly still more characteristic of the age to which they belonged. The distance and the drive lend an air of romance to a Gretna Green marriage; but the Cockney Gretna Green was in the central resort of the thieves and vulgar vice of London—the indelicacy of a gently-nurtured lady tying the nuptial knot amid such witnesses was forced upon observation : it implies a coarseness in the moral sentiment of the age when such things happened. Older traditions are associated with the Fleet Prison and its vicinity. Turbulent Barons have been confided to it in very old times ; the victims of Laud's prag- matical persecutions have been imprisoned there : but it is as part and parcel of the age which had its peculiarities immortalized by Fielding, Hogarth, and Smollett, that the Fleet will be remem- bered. The elegant genius of Pope is associated with it by allusions in the Dunciad ; Goldsmith's by his temporary residence in the vicinity; but the Fleet Prison belongs to the rough, licentious, yet withal sturdy and independent time of Fielding, Walpole, (the statesman, not the dilettante,) Steele, Mandeville, Clarke, and Doddridge—the early days of the Hanoverian sera.
There is no demolition so entire as that which takes place within the purlieus of a busy metropolis. After thousands of years have passed, the sites of Egyptian and Babylonian temples and palaces can still be recognized in the waste wilderness. Nay, monuments are daily met with in remote sequestered districts, looking like the handiwork of man, whose builders have been entirely forgotten. But where living and busy men daily resort, the building which has become frail and useless is supplanted by another. and leaves no trace more than the passage of a bird through the air. Nature wages a long and desultory war with the structures of man, and obliterates them slowly ; but man speedily tramples into irrecognizable atoms the plaything which he has made and of which he has become tired. In a few years it will be a more hopeless task to attempt to delineate the ground- plan of Fleet Prison amid the hum and bustle of London, than the ground-plan of Birs Nimrod on the silent lonely banks of the Eurhietes.
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