The papers of the year bear witness to the wickedness and barbarity of all classes of people, of both sexes. Half the highwaymen and footpads were members of his Majesty’s own guards. There was not a street or suburb of London that was free from their violence and villany. Small offences being as much a hanging matter as the most horrible crimes, lawless men found it as cheap to be murderers as petty-larcenists; and all looked to Tyburn as the last scene, in which they must necessarily figure. Three or four of these fellows, behind old Buckingham House, stopped the carriage of the Bishop of Ossory, who was on his way to Chelsea with his son. They took from the prelate’s finger his episcopal ring (of great value), and from his hand what seemed to be a pocket book, but which was a Book of Common Prayer. When the highwayman who held it saw that it was a Prayer Book, he handed it back to the bishop. ‘Had you not better keep it?’ said the prelate. ‘Thank you, no!’ rejoined the Pimlico Macheath, ‘we have no occasion for it at present, whatever may be the case at some time hereafter.’ The time alluded to was the hour of ‘hanging Wednesday,’ at Tyburn, when each patient was provided with a Prayer Book, which he often flung at someone in the crowd of spectators before he was pinioned. There was always a great variety of company at the triple tree in Tyburn field, built to accommodate a score. At a push a couple of dozen could be disposed of on a very busy hanging morning. The sufferers ranged,――from the most brutal murderers, men and women, down to timid pickpockets and shy shoplifters, boys and girls, to all of whom the bloody code of the time awarded the same measure of vengeance. The London mob were almost satiated with Tyburn holidays. It was an agreeable change for them to witness the public military funeral of old Mary Davis, who had served, both as sutler and soldier, in our wars in Flanders. In her later years, Mary kept a tavern in King Street, Westminster, bearing the curious sign of ‘Man’s worst ills.’ The crowd there, and about St. Margaret’s, where she was buried, was as great as at their Majesties’ coronation. [Sidenote: _ATTERBURY, ON MIST._] The press prosecutions of this year were few. A vendor of some reprints of former very offensive numbers of Mist’s Journal lost his liberty for a while; and a poor servant girl, for delivering to a caller (who may have been a police agent) an obnoxious pamphlet, was sentenced to imprisonment in Bridewell, there to receive ‘the correction of the house,’――which meant a severe whipping.