uld be able to bear the sight--(I give you her very
words as they were detailed to me by her relation)--the sight of a
man in a nightcap who had appeared on a public platform--it would
lead to such a disagreeable association of ideas! And to this
punctilio I was sacrificed.

To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to which
this last and heaviest might well render me callous, behold me here,
Mr. Editor! in the thirty-seventh year of my existence, (the twelfth,
reckoning from my reanimation,) cut off from all respectable
connections: rejected by the fairer half of the community,--who in my
case alone seem to have laid aside the characteristic pity of their
sex; punished because I was once punished unjustly: suffering for no
other reason than because I once had the misfortune to suffer without
any cause at all. In no other country, I think, but this, could a man
have been subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his
innocence had been clearly established.

Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the horrible
dungeons of the Inquisition,--had I heaved myself up from a half
bastinado in China, or been torn from the just-entering, ghastly
impaling stake in Barbary,--had I dropt alive from the knout in
Russia, or come off with a gashed neck from the half-mortal,
scarce-in-time-retracted cimeter of an executioneering slave in
Turkey,--I might have borne about the remnant of this frame (the
mangled trophy of reprieved innocence) with credit to myself in any
of those barbarous countries. No scorn, at least, would have mingled
with the pity (small as it might be) with which what was left of me
would have been surveyed.

The singularity of my case has often led me to inquire into the
reasons of the general levity with which the subject of hanging is
treated as a topic in this country. I say, as a topic: for let the
very persons who speak so lightly of the thing at a distance be
brought to view the real scene,--let the platform be bona fide
exhibited, and the trembling culprit brought forth,--the case is
changed; but as a topic of conversation, I appeal to the vulgar jokes
which pass current in every street. But why mention them, when the
politest authors have agreed in making use of this subject as a
source of the ridiculous? Swift, and Pope, and Prior, are fond of
recurring to it. Gay has built an entire drama upon this single
foundation. The whole interest of the _Beggar's Opera_ may b