by no means unnecessarily
afeard or distraught with anxiety; but ate and drank our fill, joked the
pretty girls who came to see the shows in the Tower, and trailed our
halberts in our usual jovial devil-me-care manner, as true Cavaliers,
Warders in the service of his Majesty the King, should do.

By and by came the news of Stirling and Falkirk, after the disastrous
retreat of the Highlandmen back into England. And then happened that
short but tremendous fight of Drummossie Moor, commonly called the
Battle of Culloden, where claymores and Lochaber axes clashed and
glinted for the last time against English broadswords and bayonets.
After this was what was called the pacification of the Highlands,
meaning that the Duke and his dragoons devastated all before them with
fire and sword; and then "retributive justice" had its turn, and the
work of the Tower Warders began in earnest.

Poor creatures! theirs was a hard fate. At Carlisle, at Manchester, at
Tyburn, and at Kennington Common, London, how many unhappy persons
suffered death in its most frightful form, to say nothing of the
unspeakable ignominy of being dragged on a hurdle to the place of
execution, and mangled in the most horrible manner by the Hangman's
butcherly knife, merely because they held that King James, and not King
George, was the rightful sovereign of these realms! Is there in all
History--at least insomuch as it touches our sentiments and feelings--a
more lamentable and pathetic narration than the story of Jemmy Dawson?
This young man, Mr. James Dawson by name,--for by the endearing
aggravative of Jemmy he is only known in Mr. William Shenstone's
charming ballad (the gentleman that lived at the Leasowes, and writ the
Schoolmistress, among other pleasing pieces, and spent so much money
upon Ornamental Gardening),--this Mr. James Dawson, I say, was the son
of highly reputable parents, dwelling, by some, 'tis said, in the county
of Lancashire, by others, in the county of Middlesex. At all events, his
father was a Gentleman of good estate, who strove hard to bring up his
son in the ways of piety and virtue. But the youth was wild and froward,
and would not listen to the sage Counsels that were continually given
him. After the ordinary grammar-school education, during which course he
much angered his teachers,--less by his reckless and disobedient conduct
than by his perverse flinging away of his opportunities, and manifest
ignoring of the parts with which he