a new character: the elements of business were borne
into the arena of pleasure. Three or four nondescript specimens of the
street-orator, who were standing just beneath me, drew suddenly forth from
the depths of their long-tailed greasy coats of serge each a bundle of
damp paper, which they flourished into flags in a twinkling; and while the
death-struggle was acting before their eyes, eager to turn it to account
and to realize an honest penny, filled the air with their roaring
intonations of "the last dying speech, confession, and behavior" of the
murderer of the season. Their example was imitated by fifty others on
different parts of the ground, and the chorus of their united voices
formed but a beggarly requiem to the departing spirit. The tragedy ended,
the farce, as a matter of course, came next. The body had to remain
suspended for an hour, and during that hour amusement must be provided, at
least for that portion of the spectators who can never have enough unless
they have the whole of an entertainment. To swing a live cat from a side
avenue into the middle of the crowd; to whirl a heavy truncheon from one
broken head on a mission to another; to kick, maul, and worry some
unfortunate stray cur that has unhappily wandered from his master; to get
up a quarrel or a fight, if between women so much the better--such are some
of the time-honored diversions chosen to recreate the hour which a
sagacious legislature presumes to be spent in moral reflections upon the
enormity of crime and the certainty of its bitter punishment, in the
presence of the law-strangled dead.

I had never before seen a public execution in England, but I knew
perfectly well--as who does not know?--the feeling with which such
exhibitions are regarded by the lower orders, and I had often revolved in
my mind the probable cause of that feeling. In now witnessing thus
accidentally the whole ceremony, I thought I perceived one source of it,
and that not a trifling one, in the ceremony itself. It struck me, and I
have no doubt but others have received the same impression, that with all
the actual horrors of the dismal process, in addition to a great deal that
is disgusting, there is a great deal more that is essentially though
horribly ridiculous in our national legal method of public killing. The
idea of tying a man's hands, of drawing over his face a white night-cap,
through which his features yet remain dimly legible, and then hanging him
up in the ai