e said to
hang upon it. To such writers as Fielding and Smollett it is a
perfect _bonne-bouche_.--Hear the facetious Tom Brown, in his
_Comical View of London and Westminster_, describe the _Order of the
Show at one of the Tyburn Executions_ in his time:--"Mr. Ordinary
visits his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight. Doleful procession
up Holborn Hill about eleven. Men handsome and proper that were never
thought so before, which is some comfort however. Arrive at the fatal
place by twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and sabbath-breaking, repented
of. Some few penitential drops fall under the gallows. Sheriffs' men,
parson, pickpockets, criminals, all very busy. The last concluding
peremptory psalm struck up. Show over by one."--In this sportive
strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so
serious, which yet he would hardly have done if he had not known that
there existed a predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable
countrymen to consider the subject as a jest. But what shall we say
to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention the solution which the
_Gravedigger_ in _Hamlet_ gives of his fellow-workman's problem,) in
that scene in _Measure for Measure_, where the _Clown_ calls upon
_Master Barnardine_ to get up and be hanged, which he declines on the
score of being sleepy, has actually gone out of his way to gratify
this amiable propensity in his countrymen; for it is plain, from the
use that was to be made of his head, and from _Abhorson's_ asking,
"Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?" that beheading, and not hanging,
was the punishment to which _Barnardine_ was destined. But Shakspeare
knew that the axe and block were pregnant with no ludicrous images,
and therefore falsified the historic truth of his own drama (if I may
so speak), rather than he would leave out such excellent matter for a
jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in mid-air has been ever
esteemed to be by Englishmen.

One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself into our
contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to be, the absurd
posture into which a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the
vulgar delight to express it, upon nothing. To see him whisking and
wavering in the air,

"As the wind you know will wave a man;"[1]

to behold the vacant carcass, from which the life is newly dislodged,
shifting between earth and heaven, the sport of every gust; like a
weathercock, serving to show from which poi