These furtive escapes did not slacken operations at Tyburn, to which doomed men from Newgate were carried in half-dozens, as if for a public entertainment. We can hardly in the present day realise the brutality of these exhibitions, to which, however, ladies of quality regularly adjourned to see the show. Hanging formed a holiday amusement of the fashionable society of London. Such was the disregard of humane feeling that officers of the law were not ashamed to practise cruel deceptions on convicts at the very scaffold. Dr Doran describes a case of this kind. It was that of a person named David Lindsay, convicted of traitorous visits to France, who was sentenced to die, and carted to Tyburn in spite of an amnesty. ‘When his neck was in the noose, the sheriff tested David’s courage, by telling him he might yet save his life on condition of revealing the names of alleged traitors. David, however sorely tempted, declined to save his neck on such terms. Thereupon, the sheriff ordered the cart to drive on; but even this move towards leaving Lindsay suspended did not shake his stout spirit. All this time the sheriff had a reprieve for the unnecessarily tortured fellow in his pocket. Before the cart was fairly from under Lindsay’s feet, it was stopped, or he would have been murdered.’ Taken back alive to Newgate, a very unusual spectacle, Lindsay, after being nearly starved in a loathsome dungeon, was sent into perpetual banishment; ultimately he died of hunger and exposure in Holland. As the hanging of some thousands of rebels would have shocked ordinary decency, vast numbers were condemned to be banished, as an act of grace, to the Plantations, or were ‘made over as presents to trading courtiers,’ who might pardon them for ‘a consideration.’ Think of lords and ladies at court being presented with groups of convicts on whom money could be made by selling pardons! The fact throws a new light on this period of English history. As regards transportation, Dr Doran gives some not uninteresting and little known particulars concerning Rob Roy. Twelve years after the rebellion of 1715, Rob was taken to London in connection with the Disarmament Act, and sentenced with many others to be transported to Barbadoes. Handcuffed to Lord Ogilvie, he was marched from Newgate through the streets of London to a barge at Blackfriars, and thence to Gravesend. ‘This,’ says Dr Doran, ‘is an incident which has escaped the notice of Walter Scott and of all Rob’s biographers.’ Before quitting England, the barge-load of convicts were pardoned and allowed to return home.