A DREAM OF THE GREAT UNPAID.
The Express, the other evening, contained a letter relating the subjoined curious dream:-
“While staying at St. Alban’s early last month I strayed into the Town Hall where the Quarter Sessions were being held, on Thursday the 8th. I then and there heard a poor agricultural labourer, out of work, for stealing a few sticks from a fagot-stack during the inclement weather, sentenced by the the Earl of Verulam (Chairman), with the concurrence of the Bench, to three years penal servitude. The poor fellow had a family of four young children, and his wife (whose distress in Court it was heartrending to see) was daily expecting a fifth. It was stated that the man had been before convicted – for stealing rabbits, I understood, – and that this was the cause of the ferocity (for so I must call it) of the sentence.”
The Earl of Verulam has the character of a benevolent nobleman, and cannot possibly have dispensed a specimen of justice like the above – as outrageous as any sentence that was ever pronounced by a bashaw on the county Bench, even if a reverend one. The correspondent of the Express must have dreamt of the cruelty with which he charges the worthy Peer. Perhaps he is fond of poetry; and on the morning of the day on which the foregoing day-dream happened to him, had been reading Wordsworth’s story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill. Lord Verulam has, no doubt, also read that story, which the poet declared to be a true one; and surely the fear of the perpetual shivers would have effectually deterred him, if any determent were needful, from giving a poor fellow three years’ penal servitude for taking a little fuel to keep himself from congelation.
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