All in the Fleet poor Logick’s moor’d
His swaggering’s now at an end!
CUT XII.—Jerry Going Back to the Country.
Three merry boys were Logick, Tom and Jerry,
And many funny larks they have seen;
Farewell, gay London, the country calls me home again,
The coach moves on—the play is done—Goodbye, Goodbye.
Quod. JAS. C-N-H, March 23, 1822.
How delightful Pierce Egan’s book was to the youths of England, and how eagerly all its promised feasts of pleasure were devoured by them, Thackeray has told us in his “Roundabout Papers—De Juventute” in the “Cornhill Magazine” for October, 1860.
Mr., afterwards Sir William Cubitt, of Ipswich, erected a treadmill at Brixton Gaol, and soon afterwards in other large prisons. A street ballad on the subject was issued from the “Catnach Press” and had a most unprecedented sale, keeping the pressmen and boys working for weeks—
“And we’re all treading at fam’d Brixton Mill.”
The treadmill—that “terror to evil doers”—excited much attention, and the inventor’s name gave rise to many jokes on the subject among such of the prisoners as could laugh at their own crimes, who said they were punished by the cubit!.