A prisoner is sitting on straw in a cave with his feet chained to the wall, there are a few provisions on a small shelf in the rock. Etching by R. Blyth after J.H. Mortimer.

A subject described in A sentimental journey thhrough France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, Dublin 1768, vol. II, pp. 23-25. The narrator Yorick, fearing imprisonment while in Paris, imagines the experience thus: "I began to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I was in a right frame for it, and so I gave full scope to my imagination. I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow-creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that the multitudes of sad groups in it did but distract me,-I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture. I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of heart it is which arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer, I saw him pale and feverish: in thirty years, the western breeze had not once fanned his blood; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time, nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice!-his children- But here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go on with another part of the portrait. He was sitting upon the ground, upon a little straw in the furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair and bed: a little calendar of small sticks was laid at the head, notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the heap. As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye towards the door; then cast it down, shook his head, and went on with his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs, as he turned his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle. He gave a deep sigh.-I saw the iron enter into his soul!"