While the wine was being drunk, Lindsay was ‘haltering,’ as the reporters called it. He was nice about the look of the rope, but just as he was being courteously invited to get in and be hanged, a reprieve came for him, which saved his life. Two other doomed rebels, for whom that day was to be their last, had been reprieved earlier in the morning, and that was why the puzzled spectators, on the way or at the place of sacrifice, were put off with five judicial murders when they had promised themselves eight. [Sidenote: _CIBBER’S ‘REFUSAL.’_] In the evening, the play which was to tempt the town was a revival of Cibber’s ‘Refusal, or the Ladies’ Philosophy.’ It had not been acted for a quarter of a century (1721), when it had failed through the opposition of the Jacobites, who damned the comedy, by way of revenge for the satire which Cibber had heaped on the Nonjurors. _Now_, the play went triumphantly. No one dared,――when the hangman was breathless with over-work, and the headsman was looking to the edge of his axe, for the ultimate disposal of Jacobites,――to openly avow himself of a way of thinking which, put into action, sent men to the block or the gallows. All that could be done in a hostile spirit was done, nevertheless. The Jacks accused Cibber of having stolen his plot from predecessors equally felonious; but they could not deny that the play was a good play; and they asserted, in order to annoy the Whig adaptor, that the _Witling_ of Theophilus Cibber was a finer touch of art than that of his father in the same part. [Sidenote: _EXECUTION OF RADCLIFFE._] On the 8th of December, Charles Radcliffe closed the bloody tragedies of the year, with his own. He came from the Tower like a man purified in spirit, prepared to meet the inevitable with dignity. They who had denied his right to call himself a peer, allowed him to die by the method practised with offenders of such high quality. The only bit of bathos in the scene on the scaffold was when the poor gentleman knelt by the side of the block, to pray. Two warders approached him, who took off his wig, and then covered his head with a white skull cap. His head was struck off at a blow, except, say the detail-loving newspapers, ‘a bit of skin which was cut through in two chops.’ The individual most to be pitied on that December morning was Radcliffe’s young son, prisoner in the Tower, who was still believed by many to be the brother of the young Chevalier.