f Nantwich, Cheshire, and he dates
from the King's Bench Prison. Philip Bliss found record in a History of
Nantwich of a monument there in St. Mary's Church, erected by Geoffrey
Minshull of Stoke, Esq., to the memory of his ancestors. He quotes also
from Geoffrey Minshull's Characters the folloiuing passage from the
Dedication, and the Character of a Prisoner._

FROM THE DEDICATION OF "ESSAYS AND CHARACTERS OF A PRISON AND
PRISONERS."

"Since my coming into this prison, what with the strangeness of the
place and strictness of my liberty, I am so transported that I could not
follow that study wherein I took great delight and chief pleasure, and
to spend my time idly would but add more discontentments to my troubled
breast, and being in this chaos of discontentments, fantasies must
arise, which will bring forth the fruits of an idle brain, for _e malis
minimum_. It is far better to give some account of time, though to
little purpose, than none at all. To which end I gathered a handful of
essays, and few characters of such things as by my own experience I
could say _Probatum est:_ not that thereby I should either please the
reader, or show exquisiteness of invention, or curious style; seeing
what I write of is but the child of sorrow, bred by discontentments and
nourished up with misfortunes, to whose help melancholy Saturn gave his
judgment, the night-bird her invention, and the ominous raven brought a
quill taken from his own wing, dipped in the ink of misery, as chief
aiders in this architect of sorrow."

A CHARACTER OF A PRISONER.

A prisoner is an impatient patient, lingering under the rough hands of a
cruel physician: his creditor having cast his water knows his disease,
and hath power to cure him, but takes more pleasure to kill him. He is
like Tantalus, who hath freedom running by his door, yet cannot enjoy
the least benefit thereof. His greatest grief is that his credit was so
good and now no better. His land is drawn within the compass of a
sheep's skin, and his own hand the fornication that bars him of
entrance: he is fortune's tossing-ball, an object that would make mirth
melancholy: to his friends an abject, and a subject of nine days' wonder
in every barber's shop, and a mouthful of pity (that he had no better
fortune) to midwives and talkative gossips; and all the content that
this transitory life can give him seems but to flout him, in respect the
restraint of liberty bars the true use. To his famil