Note 99 — BOOK VI[60]

Here for instance, is Charles Dickens' lurid description of the Pozzi, or Prisons, which he pretends to see in a dream:

"I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a torch was placed—I dreamed—to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with the rusty nail's point had outlived their agony and them, through many generations.

"One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the Confessor came—a monk brown-robed and hooded—ghastly in the day and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's extinguisher and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door—low-browed and stealthy—through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net." (Pictures from Italy: An Italian Dream.)—T.