"Receive a letter to me from Mrs. Boyd, my cousin Malcomb's widow; I shall desire her to write to you for an answer. "Accept of my sincere thanks for your friendship and good services to me. Continue them to my wife and children. "My best wishes are to you and yours, and for the happiness and prosperity of the good town of Kilmarnock, and I am, sir, your humble servant, "KILMARNOCK." Tower of London, August 16th, 1746. On the Saturday previous to the execution of Lord Kilmarnock, General Williamson gave his prisoners a minute account of all the circumstances of solemnity, and outward terror, which would accompany it. Lord Kilmarnock heard it much with the same expression of concern as a man of a compassionate disposition would read it, in relation to others. After suggesting a trifling alteration in the arrangements after the execution, he expressed his regret that the headsman should be, as General Williamson informed him, a "good sort of man;" remarking, that one of a rougher nature and harder heart, would be more likely to do his work quickly. He then requested that four persons might be appointed to receive the head when it was severed from the body, in a red cloth; that it might not, as he had heard was the case at other executions, "roll about the scaffold and be mangled and disfigured." "For I would not," he added, "though it may be but a trifling matter, that my remains should appear with any needless indecency after the just sentence of the law is satisfied." He spoke calmly and easily on all these particulars, nor did he even shrink when told that his head would be held up and exhibited to the multitude as that of a traitor. "He knew," he said, "that it was usual, and it did not affect him." During these singular conversations, his spiritual attendant and the General, could hardly have been more precise in their descriptions had they been portraying the festive ceremonials of a coming bridal, than they were in the fearful minutiae of the approaching execution. It was thought by them that such recitals would accustom the mind of the prisoner to the apparatus and formalities that would attend his death, and that these would lose their influence over his mind. "He allowed with me," observes Mr. Foster, "that such circumstances were not so melancholy as dying after a lingering disorder, in a darkened room, with weeping friends around one, and whilst the shattered frame sank under slow exhaustion." But experience and human feelings contradict this observation of the resigned and unhappy sufferer; we look to death, under such an aspect, as the approach of rest; but human nature shrinks from the violent struggle, the momentary but fierce convulsion, plunging us, as it were, into the abyss of the grave.