The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

by Leigh Hunt

"Through Lud's famed gates, along the well-known Fleet,

Rolls the black troop and overshades the street;

Till showers of sermons, characters, essays,

In circling fences whiten all the ways:

So clouds replenished from some bog below,

Mount in dark volumes and descend in snow."

The "well-known Fleet" is the prison just mentioned, the side of which appears to have been visible at that time in Ludgate Hill, and where it was a joke (too often founded in truth) to suppose authors incarcerated.

"Few sons of Phœbus in the courts we meet;

But fifty sons of Phœbus in the Fleet,"