In 1654 the writings of John Reeves and Ludowick Muggleton, self-styled prophets, were burned in Boston market-place by that abhorred public functionary the hangman. Other Quaker books were similarly burned, and John Rogers of New London, who hated the Quakers, but whom the Boston magistrates persisted in regarding and classifying as a Quaker, had to see his books perish in the flames in company with Quaker publications. In 1754 a pamphlet called _The Monster of Monsters_, a sharp criticism on the Massachusetts Court which caused much stir in provincial political circles, was burned by the hangman in King Street, Boston. We learn from the _Connecticut Gazette_ that about the same time another offending publication was sentenced to be "publickly whipt according to Moses Law, with forty stripes save one, and then burnt." The true book-lover winces at the thought of the blood-stained hands of the hangman on any book, even though a "Monster." VI THE WHIPPING-POST John Taylour, the "Water-Poet," wrote in 1630: "In London, and within a mile, I ween There are jails or prisons full fifteen And sixty whipping-posts and stocks and cages." Church and city records throughout England show how constantly these whipping-posts were made to perform their share of legal and restrictive duties. In the reign of Henry VIII a famous Whipping Act had been passed by which all vagrants were to be whipped severely at the cart-tail "till the body became bloody by reason of such whipping." This enactment remained in force nearly through the reign of Elizabeth, when the whipping-post became the usual substitute for the cart, but the force of the blows was not lightened. The poet Cowper has left in one of his letters an amusing account of a sanguinary whipping which he witnessed. The thief had stolen some ironwork at a fire at Olney in 1783, and had been tried, and sentenced to be whipped at the cart-tail. [Illustration: Whipping at the Cart's Tayle.]