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!"