A contemporary of Dickens, in the "Ingoldsby Legends," has given us a picture, in a different vein, of the same period and subject. He has told us, in his own rattling verse, how my Lord Tomnoddy, having nothing to do, and being deucedly bored, learned from his faithful Tiger Tim that Greenacre was to be hanged at Newgate; here was indeed a sensation for His Lordship: "To see a man swing, at the end of a string, with his neck in a noose, will be quite a new thing." So he hires the whole first floor of the Magpie and Stump, opposite the jail, and invites his friends to come and help him see a man die in his shoes. They help him so effectually during the night, what with "cold fowl and cigars, pickled onions in jars, Welsh rabbits and kidney, rare work for jaws, and very large lobsters with fine claws," and the like, not to mention gin-toddy and cold and hot punch, that they fall asleep and lose the show after all, when, as they cannot have the man hung over again, they go home to bed in hackney coaches and a state of deep disgust. Another contemporary, of more ample renown, Thackeray to wit, gave some attention to the matter. In July, 1840, he published, in Frazer's Magazine, a paper called "Going to see a man hanged." The man was Courvoiser; and Thackeray, unlike Lord Tomnoddy, did not fall asleep over the feast, and so did see him mount the scaffold. Surgeons' Hall used to stand close to Newgate and the Old Bailey, and the victims of the halter were handed over to the doctors for dissection. The corpse of wicked Lord Ferrers, who was executed in 1760 at Tyburn for murdering his steward, was taken in his own landau and six to the Burgeons' Theatre to be cut up. After having been disemboweled, in conformance with the sentence, the body of the bad lord was put on show in the first floor window, to be hissed and hooted at by the mob. The account of the Ferrers execution, by the way, provides a curious picture of the time. Ferrers dressed himself in his wedding suit to be hanged. He had the harness of his horses decorated with ribbons. On the way to Tyburn from the Tower, my Lord intimated a desire for some wine, being thirsty. The Sheriff, who was in the coach with him, declined to allow him to refresh himself. "Then," said the Earl, taking a bite of pigtail tobacco from a plug which he had in his pocket, "I must be content with this." He harbored no malice against the Sheriff, however, for he presented him with his watch as they neared Tyburn. To the Chaplain he gave five guineas, and to the executioner the same sum. The executioner had to pull him by the legs to effectually strangle him, and while the body swung for an hour on the gallows, the sheriffs and their friends had luncheon on the platform within reach of it. "The executioners fought for the rope," says the chronicler, "and the one who lost it, cried."