carved. The front of this magnificent hospital is reported to
represent the Escurial in Spain, and in some respects exceeds every
palace in or about London, being 528 feet in length, and regularly
built. The inside, it is true, is not answerable to the grand
appearance it makes without, being but 30 feet broad, and consisting
chiefly of a long gallery in each of the two storeys that runs from
one end of the house to the other; on the south side whereof are
little cells, wherein the patients have their lodgings, and on the
north the windows that give light to the galleries, which are
divided in the middle by a handsome iron gate, to keep the men and
women asunder.

In order to procure a person to be admitted into the hospital, a
petition must be preferred to a committee of the governors, who sit
at Bedlam seven at a time weekly, which must be signed by the
churchwardens, or other reputable persons of the parish the lunatic
belongs to, and also recommended to the said committee by one of the
governors; and this being approved by the president and governors,
and entered in a book, upon a vacancy (in their turn) an order is
granted for their being received into the house, where the said
lunatic is accommodated with a room, proper physic and diet, gratis.
The diet is very good and wholesome, being commonly boiled beef,
mutton, or veal, and broth, with bread, for dinners on Sundays,
Tuesdays, and Thursdays, the other days bread, cheese, and butter,
or on Saturdays pease-pottage, rice-milk, furmity, or other pottage,
and for supper they have usually broth or milk pottage, always with
bread. And there is farther care taken, that some of the committee
go on a Saturday weekly to the said hospital to see the provisions
weighed, and that the same be good and rightly expended.