Release of Mr Edmund Yates.

Te Aroha News, Volume III, Issue 106, 13 June 1885, Page 6

Release of Mr Edmund Yates.

Mr Edmuxd Yates has just been released. He drove away in a brougham, a lady and his private secretary coming to meet him. He looked jaded. His release was entirely unexpected, the governor enly receiving the order on the morning of his* release. In one respect Mr Yates has been more fortunate than Leigh Hunt, who underwent the uttermost penalty of a literary indiscretion, remainingtwo whole years in Horse-monger-lane Gaol —to the permanent injury of his health, as he believed, tie had also to pay a fine of £500. In other respects the editor of the" Exa niner" was probably better off under the old system than a first-class misdemeanant of the present day. Seventy years ago there were fewer regulations ; and a prisoner who chose to Day could have almost anything he wished except liberty. Thus Lcgh Hunt tells how he turned a ward of the infirmary in w Inch he was confined into a " noble " room : " I papered the walls with a trellis of roses ; I had the ceiling covered with clouds and sky ; the barred windows I screened with Venetian blinds ; and when my book-oases were pet up with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their appearance, perhap? there was not a handsomer room on that side the water." He adds : " I took a pleasure, when a stranger knocked at the door, to see him come in undstareabouHiim. . . . Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room except in a fairy tale. But I possessed another surprise, which was a garden." And so on. The following fact, which he has noted, is curious : "I never dreamt of prison but twice all the time I was there ; and my dream was the same on both occasions. I fancied I was at the theatre, and bhat the whole house looked at me in surprise, as much as to say, how could he get jut of prison ?"

" A Labour of Love "—A bashful youth M»sayine r 'op 'h^ question " The Board of Trade— A workman's bench.