and peaked hat with sable feather, and with one flashing sweep of his terrible blade severed heads from shoulders of well-born criminals, was dissipated and forgotten. Still, on the crowded and diversified canvass of the middle ages, the strange figure stands prominently forth, recalling, by its associations, many a dark deed and wild legend. But the change is great since then. “The executioner now-a-days,” says Mr Chézy, “is a citizen like any body else, an elector and eligible; if he possess enough property, he may be sent as deputy to the second Chamber, and perhaps give his vote against capital punishment. The headsman of former centuries has faded into a tradition; and a poet may therefore be allowed to sketch his portrait once more, perhaps for the last time, in all its different aspects and mysterious horrors.” And without further prelude, we are introduced to the last minister of the law, a meek and melancholy man, who remembers, one still Sabbath morning, that it is his bounden duty to keep up the record in the Malefizbuch, begun by his great-grandfather, the first of his race who could write. Whilst pondering over this necessity, he incidentally recapitulates some of his privileges and advantages; how he is of as good descent after his kind as the best nobleman in the holy Roman empire, tracing back his genealogy to the days of Henry the First of Germany, surnamed the Fowler, who nominated his ancestor to the office of executioner, since when the family has held house and ground, goods and profits, in fief of the crown. And how he is no way subject to the authorities of the land, further than that he is bound to serve them with sword, axe, wheel and cord, with ladder, screws and tongs, pitch, sulphur and rods, either in his own person or by his assistants, as his letter of privileges dictates. Neither is he infamous, like those of his men who remove dead beasts and do such like unclean work; and, whoever addresses him with contemptuous speech, shall be fined according to law of the empire, as if he had insulted a lord of the council. Finally, when the number of unfortunates slain by his hand shall exceed five hundred, the headsman has a right, if it so please him, to abandon his charge, and mix once more upon equal terms with his fellow-citizens. After this recapitulation, Master Hammerling takes up his own history from the day of his birth, when he was laid in his father’s arms as he returned from burning an old witch upon the market-place. This he finds set down in his father’s hand-writing, and also how he was christened by the name of Berthold, on the very day on which Black Hannah, the child-murderess, was executed; whilst her accomplice, long Heinz, was compelled to look on at the execution, and was then flogged out of the town and district. The latter would have been hung, had not the executioner saved him, in virtue of an old privilege, which he exercised less out of love for