Reasons for legal punishments—Early forms—Capital punishment universal—Methods of inflicting death—Awful cruelties—The English custom—Pressing to death—Abolition of this punishment —Decapitation and strangulation—The guillotine and gallows— Smithfield, St. Giles, Tower Hill, Tyburn—Derivation of Tyburn —An execution in 1662—Fashionable folk attend—George Selwyn —Breakfast party at Newgate—Ribald conduct of the mob at executions—Demeanour of condemned: effrontery, or abject terror—Improper customs long retained—St. Giles's Bowl— Saddler of Bawtry—Smoking at Tyburn—Richard Dove's bequest— The hangman and his office—Resuscitation—Sir William Petty's operation—Tyburn procession continues—Supported by Doctor Johnson—The front of Newgate substituted as the scene of execution. The universal instinct of self-preservation underlies the whole theory of legal punishments. Society, from the earliest beginnings, has claimed through its rulers to inflict penalties upon those who have broken the laws framed for the protection of all. These penalties have varied greatly in all ages and in all times. They have been based on different principles. Many, especially in ruder and earlier times, have been conceived in a vindictive spirit; others, notably those of Mosaic law, were retaliatory, or aimed at restitution. All, more or less, were intended to deter from crime. The criminal had generally to pay in his person or his goods. He was either subjected to physical pain applied in degrading, often ferociously cruel ways, and endured mutilation, or was branded, tortured, put to death; he was mulcted in fines, deprived of liberty, or adjudged as a slave to indemnify by manual labour those whom he had wronged. Imprisonment as practised in modern times has followed from the last-named class of punishments. Although affecting the individual, and in many of its phases with brutal and reckless disregard for human suffering, it can hardly be styled a purely personal punishment, as will be shown from a closer examination of the various methods of corporeal punishment. In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the poorer sort was the wild revelry of the aristocratic prisoners of the press-yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom alone excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest officials to suffer them to escape.