In June 1731 Japhet Crook, _alias_ Sir Peter Stranger, who had been found guilty of forging the writings to an estate, was sentenced to imprisonment for life.[388] He was condemned to stand for one hour in the pillory at Charing Cross. He was then seated in an elbow-chair; the common hangman cut off both his ears with an incision knife, and then delivered them to Mr. Watson, a sheriff’s officer. He also slit both Crook’s nostrils with a pair of scissors, and seared them with a hot iron, pursuant to the sentence. A surgeon attended on the pillory and instantly applied styptics to prevent the effusion of blood. The man bore the operations with undaunted courage. He laughed on the pillory, and denied the fact to the last. He was then removed to the Ship Tavern at Charing Cross, and thence taken back to the King’s Bench prison, to be confined there for life.[389] This Crook had forged the conveyance, to himself, of an estate, upon which he took up several thousand pounds. He was at the same time sued in Chancery for having fraudulently obtained a will and wrongfully gained an estate. In spite of losing his ears, he enjoyed the ill-gained money in prison till the day of his death, and then quietly left it to his executor. He is mentioned by Pope in his 3d epistle, written in 1732. Talking of riches, he says-- “What can they give?--to dying Hopkins heirs? To Chartres vigour? Japhet nose and ears?”[390] It was in this essay that, having been accused of attacking the Duke of Chandos, Pope first began to attack vices instead of follies, and, in order to prevent mistakes, boldly to publish the names of the malefactors whom he gibbeted. Crook had been a brewer on Tower Hill. The 2d George II., c. 25, made forgery a felony; and the first sufferer under the new law was Richard Cooper, a Stepney victualler, who was hanged at Tyburn, in June 1731, six days only after the older and luckier thief had stood in the pillory. In 1763 Parsons, the parish-clerk of St. Sepulchre’s, and the impudent contriver of the “Cock Lane ghost” deception, mounted here to the same bad eminence. Parsons’s child, a cunning little girl of twelve years, had contrived to tap on her bed in a way that served to convey what were supposed to be supernatural messages. It proved to be a plot devised by Parsons out of malice against a gentleman of Norfolk who had sued him for a debt. This gentleman was a widower, who had taken his wife’s sister as his mistress--a marriage with her being forbidden by law--and had brought her to lodge with Parsons, from whence he had removed her to other lodgings, where she had died suddenly of small-pox. The object of Parsons was to obtain the ghost’s declaration that she had been poisoned by Parsons’s creditor. The rascal was set three times in the pillory and imprisoned for a year in the King’s Bench. The people, however, singularly enough, did not pelt the impudent rogue, but actually collected money for him.