“It is a fact, Sir, that while witnessing this horrible execution, I felt all the effects vulgarly ascribed to fascination. I shuddered at the first movement--the dull and deep whisper among the crowd. I shrieked involuntarily when the first decisive movements began among them; but when at last the human shapeless carrion was dashed against the door, I echoed the wild shouts of the multitude with a kind of savage instinct. I bounded--I clasped my hands for a moment--then I echoed the screams of the thing that seemed no longer to live, but still could scream; and I screamed aloud and wildly for life--life--and mercy! One face was turned towards me as I shrieked in unconscious tones. The glance, fixed on me for a moment, was in a moment withdrawn. The flash of the well-known eyes made no impression on me then. My existence was so purely mechanical, that, without the least consciousness of my own danger, (scarce less than that of the victim, had I been detected), I remained uttering shout for shout, and scream for scream--offering worlds in imagination to be able to remove from the window, yet feeling as if every shriek I uttered was as a nail that fastened me to it--dropping my eye-lids, and feeling as if a hand held them open, or cut them away--forcing me to gaze on all that passed below, like Regulus, with his lids cut off, compelled to gaze on the sun that withered up his eye-balls--till sense, and sight, and soul, failed me, and I fell grasping by the bars of the window, and mimicking, in my horrid trance, the shouts of the multitude, and the yell of the devoted(5). I actually for a moment believed myself the object of their cruelty. The drama of terror has the irresistible power of converting its audience into its victims. (5) In the year 1803, when Emmett’s insurrection broke out in Dublin--(_the fact_ from which this account is drawn was related to me by an eye-witness)--Lord Kilwarden, in passing through Thomas Street, was dragged from his carriage, and murdered in the most horrid manner. Pike after pike was thrust through his body, till at last he was _nailed to a door_, and called out to his murderers to “put him out of his pain.” At this moment, a shoemaker, who lodged in the garret of an opposite house, was drawn to the window by the horrible cries he heard. He stood at the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempting vainly to drag him away. He saw the last blow struck--he heard the last groan uttered, as the sufferer cried, “put me out of pain,” while sixty pikes were thrusting at him. The man stood at his window as if nailed to it; and when dragged from it, became--an _idiot for life_. “The Jew had kept apart from the tumult of the night. He had, I suppose, been saying within himself, in the language of your admirable poet, “Oh, Father Abraham, what these Christians are!”