Some years before, I had witnessed in Paris the execution of two men for assassination. The crowd on that occasion, in the Place de Grève, was as great as now in the Old Bailey; but their decorum, I am bound to state, was infinitely greater. I can only account for this difference in favor of a population among whom human life is at a far greater discount than it is with us, from the fact that among the French a public execution is a much more impressive spectacle than it can be made to be in England. The guillotine bears a higher character, perhaps, because it wears a more serious and terrible aspect than the gallows; and the functionary who controls its avenging blade does not, as with us, bear a name the synonym of all that is loathsome and repulsive. It is the same class of men and the same order of minds that flock together to gaze at public executions wherever they take place; but I question whether, in any other country than England, a class of traders could be found corresponding with our hawkers and bawlers of last dying speeches, who congregate with their lying wares around the foot of the gallows, watchfully waiting for the commencement of the death-struggle, to them the signal of commerce, and then at the precise moment of horror, unanimously exploding from their hoarse throats “a full, true, and particular account, for the small charge of one half-penny.” The meanest mud-lark in all Gaul, the infamous and mal-odorous _chiffonier_ of Paris, would recoil with disgust from such a species of traffic, the prevalence and prosperity of which at such a time among the lowest orders of London, testify perhaps more than any other single fact to the degraded state of the popular feeling in reference to death-punishment by the hands of the hangman.