What strikes me most in thinking of this performance is the contrast that exists in England between the mildness and the leniency of the English customs and legislation in criminal matters, and the barbarity and savagery of the entertainments in their playhouses. On the same morning that “Hamlet” was performed, the execution of Dr. Dodd was carried out at Tyburn. Doctor Dodd was a minister of the Church, highly respected for his eloquence. He had been _Aumonier_ to the King, and cherished the ambition of becoming a bishop. With this object, he had caused his wife to offer the sum of a thousand guineas to the wife of a Minister. The transaction was discovered and Dr. Dodd was dismissed from his post, but still retained a living. He had been the tutor of a son of a man who is well known here, Lord Chesterfield, and in the name of the young lord he signed a bond of four thousand guineas. This was also discovered, and it constitutes what they here call the crime of forgery, for which Dr. Dodd was condemned to death. In spite of many petitions the sentence was carried out yesterday, June 27. I assisted at the execution. A stranger accustomed to the terror-inspiring machinery, to the noise and fuss with which, in the rest of Europe, the decrees of justice are executed, and which are designed to serve as a terrible example, would be astonished at the manner in which it is done here. Here there are no soldiers, no representatives of the army, no outward signs of ferocity, no preliminary torture. Here that humanity, which the law seems to forget from the moment the judge has uttered the word guilty--by letting a long delay elapse between the pronouncement of the sentence and the execution--reappears as soon as the prison opens its doors and delivers the prisoner to the sheriffs, who are charged with carrying out the sentence. The sheriffs are not military men; they have no mercenaries under them, but merely a certain number of constables, ordinary _bourgeois_, whose only uniform consists in a long stick painted and partially gilded. The victim, bound, without constraint, by the cord which is to hang him, is seated on a cart draped in black, or he may obtain leave to use a carriage, and this is what was done yesterday. The carriage passed slowly up Oxford Street, one of the longest and broadest streets of London. The prisoner had no escort, save a small number of constables on foot, and some sheriffs on horseback. He is condemned by the law, it is the law which leads him to death. The officers show no signs, either of threatening or fear, lest the people should oppose themselves to a severity which has their safety for object.