he hardness of
the Law which made it so; but some little pains being taken with him in
those points, he was soon brought over to acknowledge the justice of his
sentence, and the reasonableness of that Statute which enacted it into a
capital offence.

As the day of his death drew nigh he was still more and more drowned in
stupidity and lost to all thought or concern for this world or that to
come, at least as to outward appearance. Some said he was a Roman
Catholic, but while the poor wretch retained his senses, he said nothing
that could give any ground for a suspicion of that sort. He heard the
discourses which the Ordinary made to him, with as much patience as the
rest did, and when he visited him in the cell, did not express any
uneasiness thereat. Indeed, in the passage to execution, there were two
fellows in the cart who would fain have had the minister desist from his
duty, urging the same reason, that the criminal was in communion with
another Church. The man, himself, seemed stupid and speechless all the
way, yet when he was turned off, the reverend Ordinary tells us, he went
off the stage crying out aloud, _O Lord! etc._ This seems to me a very
indecent way of concluding a dying speech, but as it is that which is
generally used, I shall not stay to bestow any further reflections upon
it. He died on the 19th of May, 1729, being about twenty-five years of
age.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] See page 221.

The Life of THOMAS JAMES GRUNDY, a Housebreaker

When we meet with accounts of persons doubly remarkable for the
multitude of their offences and the tenderness of their age, it is
almost impossible for us to determine whether we should most pity or
detest a mind so preternaturally abandoned to wickedness as to transcend
its usual course, and make itself remarkable as a sinner, before taken
notice of as a man.

This was exactly the case with the unfortunate criminal whom we are now
to mention. He was the son of parents in the lowest circumstances, who
yet had strained those circumstances to give him a tolerable education,
which he, instead of improving, forgot as fast as it was possible, and
seemed solicitous about nothing but out-doing in villainy all his
contemporaries of the same unhappy cast. During his junior years he
addicted himself continually to picking and stealing whatever he could
lay his hands on, and although his father had been exceedingly careful
in causing him to be taught his own trade of