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Since the death of its brave owner, to whom feasting and hospitality seemed as natural as thoughts of honour and deeds of chivalry, the gloom of a convent might be said to have enveloped the ancient mansion of Raymond Berenger, were it not that the presence of so many armed warders, stalking in solemn state on the battlements, gave it rather the aspect of a state-prison; and the temper of the inhabitants gradually became infected by the character of their dwelling.
The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and other places of public resort, and loud in appearance as they are obscene in talk, are, in the estimation of every self-respecting man, eminently fitted by Lucifer for laboring in the State-prison quarries for the term of their natural lives.
Adjoining Elsinore, and at the edge of the peninsular promontory, upon the nearest point of land to the Swedish coast, stands Cronenburgh Castle, built after Tycho Brahe's design; a magnificent pile at once a palace, and fortress, and state-prison, with its spires, and towers, and battlements, and batteries.
If they were not Frenchmen, they might be honest-thieves or criminals, escaped from justice or from the friendly state-prison of New York. This last supposition was, however, more violent than the others, or seems so to us in this day of grace.
He took defeat with a good nature that robbed it of its sting, and made his political opponents half sorry for having beaten him. He was talked of for Governor at one time, and he gave as a reason, why he would like the office that "a great many of his friends were in the State-prison, and he wanted to use the pardoning power in their behalf."
We were now in the deepest and ugliest part of the old Mamertine Prison, one of the few remains of the kingly period of Rome, and which served the Romans as a state-prison for hundreds of years before the Christian era. A multitude of criminals or innocent persons, no doubt, have languished here in misery, and perished in darkness.
On the night of 5th June the prisoners were taken from their prison in the Hague and conveyed to the castle of Loevestein. This fortress, destined thenceforth to be famous in history and from its frequent use in after-times as a state-prison for men of similar constitutional views to those of Grotius and the Advocate to give its name to a political party, was a place of extraordinary strength.
If they were not Frenchmen, they might be honest-thieves or criminals, escaped from justice or from the friendly state-prison of New York. This last supposition was, however, more violent than the others, or seems so to us in this day of grace.
As they ascended from the river-side to the centre of the building, where the fine old keep of William the Conqueror, called the White Tower, predominates over the exterior defences, Heaven only knows how many gallant jests, good or bad, were run on the comparison of his Majesty's state-prison to that of Cupid, and what killing similes were drawn between the ladies' eyes and the guns of the fortress, which, spoken with a fashionable congée, and listened to with a smile from a fair lady, formed the fine conversations of the day.
This was always with their consent, except in two or three cases of inveterate wickedness, when, instead of sending the fellows to the state-prison for life, as you would do at the North, I sold them to go to Red River, and was as willing to see them marched off, handcuffed, as you ever were to see villains in the custody of the officers.
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