“Love is a great thing,” writes an Italian philosopher, “but hunger surpasses everything.”
“O who can tell the panes I feel,
A poor and harmless sailor,
I miss my grog and every meal;
Here comes the blooming jailer.”
A poet, Crutchy Quinn by name, known to Mr. Davitt, and who was himself acquainted with seven of the prisons he characterises, wrote as follows with a nail on the bottom of a dinner can:—
“Millbank for thick shins and graft at the pump;
Broadmoor for all laggs as go off their chump;
Brixton for good toke and cocoa with fat;
Dartmoor for bad grub but plenty of chat;
Portsmouth, a blooming bad place for hard work;
Chatham on Sunday gives four ounce of pork;
Portland is worst of the lot for to joke in—
For fetching a lagging there’s no place like Woking.”
Quinn, in spite of his name, was not an Irishman, but two-thirds of the prison-poets, Mr. Davitt found, are Irish.
From the more miscellaneous group of sentimental, religious, moral, didactic, and reflective sayings may be quoted the following:—
“The heart may breake, yet may brokenly live on.”
Mr. Davitt found a book at Newgate with “Good-bye, Lucy dear,” written throughout it, and at the end—
“Good-bye, Lucy dear,
I’m parted from you for seven long year.
Alf. Jones.”
A poet of a more caustic school had added beneath this—