I was not fixed indeed; 'tis impossible to describe the terror of my
mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked around upon all
the horrors of that dismal place. I looked on myself as lost, and that
I had nothing to think of but of going out of the world, and that with
the utmost infamy: the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing, and
clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of
afflicting things that I saw there, joined together to make the place
seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.
Now I reproached myself with the many hints I had had, as I have
mentioned above, from my own reason, from the sense of my good
circumstances, and of the many dangers I had escaped, to leave off
while I was well, and how I had withstood them all, and hardened my
thoughts against all fear. It seemed to me that I was hurried on by an
inevitable and unseen fate to this day of misery, and that now I was to
expiate all my offences at the gallows; that I was now to give
satisfaction to justice with my blood, and that I was come to the last
hour of my life and of my wickedness together. These things poured
themselves in upon my thoughts in a confused manner, and left me
overwhelmed with melancholy and despair.
Them I repented heartily of all my life past, but that repentance
yielded me no satisfaction, no peace, no, not in the least, because, as
I said to myself, it was repenting after the power of further sinning
was taken away. I seemed not to mourn that I had committed such
crimes, and for the fact as it was an offence against God and my
neighbour, but I mourned that I was to be punished for it. I was a
penitent, as I thought, not that I had sinned, but that I was to
suffer, and this took away all the comfort, and even the hope of my
repentance in my own thoughts.
I got no sleep for several nights or days after I came into that
wretched place, and glad I would have been for some time to have died
there, though I did not consider dying as it ought to be considered
neither; indeed, nothing could be filled with more horror to my
imagination than the very place, nothing was more odious to me than the
company that was there. Oh! if I had but been sent to any place in
the world, and not to Newgate, I should have thought myself happy.