“Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history,”[95] is that of a man named Cook, a bookbinder, who murdered Mr. Paas, with the iron handle of his press, at Leicester, in 1834. He was sentenced to death, and the body ordered to be gibbeted. This was done in Saffron Lane, outside the town, and the disgraceful scene around the gibbet, as described by an eye-witness, was like a fair. A Dissenter mounted upon a barrel and preached to the people, who only ridiculed him, and the general rioting soon led to an order for the removal of the body.[96] In the same year (4 William IV.) Hanging in Chains was abolished by statute. The irons which proved so strong a magnet are now preserved in Leicester Gaol. Finally, an accomplished Northamptonshire antiquary[97] informs us that many years ago he came to a lone hill at Elsdon, near Morpeth, in Northumberland, and found a gibbet with a wooden head hanging from it; this still exists. It seems that the murderer, whose crime it recorded, William Winter, who slew Margaret Crozier, in 1791, sat down to his lunch in a sheep-fold, and a curious shepherd-boy abstractedly counted the nails in his boots, and noticed his peculiar knife, and this led to his apprehension. The wooden head is a memorial of the savage past, a relic of “the good old times,” which we may truly rejoice to think have passed away for ever. We have now dealt with some of the changeless passions in what the immortal Castaway calls “that strange chequer-work of Providence, the life of man.” We have traversed the gory path of dishonour from end to end, at times with wide steps, a way often obscure, and ever slippery with blood. It has not been necessary to go to mendacious chroniclers, or scandalous diaries, for this story of man’s high nature in some of its degradations, for we have, verily, as in the “Visions of Mirza,”[98] essayed to cross the bridge over the Vale of Misery; we have “unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies.”[99] It has been impossible to treat of such a ghastly subject--of which the horrors seem to burn themselves into the mind--without a certain amount of ghastliness; indeed, without the plea of attempting to throw a ray of light into some of these dark corners of history, we should almost have flinched from bringing forward these melancholy topics, making sensibility shudder, and which our readers may, perchance, find it a pleasure to forget. And in imagination we already hear the cry-- “Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.”[100] THE END.