No doubt this gruesome spectacle was intended to strike awe into the hearts of the beholders. But human nature, being a thing perverse, is not always understood. Its most disastrous result on the manners of the time was rather to glorify crime and criminal. A fitting end at Tyburn gave distinction to many a poor rogue who otherwise would have left the world unhonoured and forgotten. Four centuries of Tyburn’s rough justice did less for the suppression of crime than more enlightened and humane efforts have done in the course of comparatively few years. The triangular plan had already been adopted in Shakespeare’s time, and probably long before, as references to it imply a common knowledge. In _Love’s Labour Lost_, one of his earlier plays, he has Biron saying: “Thou makest the triumviry the corner cap of Society, The shape of Love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity.” In an old quarto of 1589 occurs the passage:[2] “Then let me be put on Tyburn, that hath but three quarters.” Only thirteen years earlier, Gascoigne, strangely enough, speaks of “Tyborne Cross.” The gallows where so many highwaymen of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, in the phrase of the day, “turned off,” is shown in the drawings of Hogarth and a host of others, as well as in maps of contemporary date. At each of the three corners of a triangle a stout upright post was set in the ground. In some cases two cross beams are seen fastened to the tops of these posts, in others three, forming a sort of triangular enclosure. It was quite low, rising not more than twelve feet from the ground, and giving just enough room for the malefactor’s cart to pass beneath. So thorough have been the measures taken to sweep Tyburn and all its associations out of the Metropolis, since the fashionable area of the town extended westward, that the particular spot on which stood the “Triple Tree” is also left uncertain. It can, however, be pretty closely approximated. It was never actually within the Royal Park, but was just beyond its northern boundary, standing back from the high road to Uxbridge, about a hundred yards west of the Marble Arch. A house near the corner of Connaught Square is believed to be built on the actual site of Tyburn gallows, which originally stood on the rise, where the ground was open to the Park. The “Triple Tree” was, however, moved to the triangular space now forming the entrance to the Edgware Road, early in the eighteenth century.