CITY OF WORCESTER. 379

Langan was announced here, in 1824, did "the magistrates make one effort to prevent it! Certainly not, hut several of them joined in the mob of 40,000 people who assembled to witness it; Lord Deerhurst and Sir James Musgrave "kept tune," and Colonel Berkeley was umpire! On that occasion the wooden buildings erected for the spectators fell, occasioning the death of one person and wounding nearly a hundred others. Then, again, consider the gaol reforms we have witnessed. In the old prison the gaoler sold drink to the prisoners, and tormented with double irons those who could not afford to purchase it at extortionate prices. Here, too, on Assize Sundays, the keepers exhibited the prisoners through the bars to admiring crowds, and collected money in a boot for pointing out those condemned to be hung! The Judges and the Bar, with the nobility and gentry of the county, had Assize balls on every commission day, and though the learned representatives, of the Crown did not dance they played at whist! It is true that in our own days this brutality has given way to the other extreme of namby-pamby sympathy with criminals, but this, too, will ere long work its own cure; and the recent amalgamation of the city and county prisons, by the suppression of tbe former, is a measure calculated not only to promote so desirable a result, but to occasion a considerable saving to the ratepayers.

The good old city is clean and attractive, with fine long level streets and handsome shops; and the inhabitants manage to get the good word of most visitors. We have yet left some means of recreation - boating, billiards, chess, theatre, races, cricket, and a brace of bowling greens, but, strange to say, no public reading room! There are monthly fairs, and capital markets every Wednesday and Saturday; two companies of Rifles and one Artillery corps; a troop of Yeomanry Cavalry; railways in connection with London and Birmingham, Oxford and Wolverhampton, Hereford, and the Severn Valley to Shrewsbury. At tbe commencement of the civil wars the population of the city, including 2,000 soldiers and trained