_Family of Love_.--Referring to Dr. RIMBAULT'S communication on the subject of this sect (Vol. ii., p. 49.), will you allow me to inquire whether there is any evidence that its members deserved Fuller's severe condemnation? Queen Elizabeth might consider them a "damnable sect," if they were believed to hold heterodox opinions in religion and politics; but were their lives or their writings immoral? N.B. _Sir Gammer Vans_.--Can any one give any account of a comic story about one "_Sir Gammer Vans_," of whom, amongst other absurdities, it is said "_that his aunt was a justice of peace, and his sister a captain of horse_"? It is alluded to somewhere {90} in Swift's _Letters_ or _Miscellanies_; and I was told by a person whose recollection, added to my own, goes back near a hundred years, that it was supposed to be a _political satire_, and may have been of Irish origin, as I think there is some allusion to it in one of Goldsmith's plays or essays. C. * * * * * REPLIES PUNISHMENT OF DEATH BY BURNING. Probably some of the readers of "NOTES AND QUERIES" will share in the surprise expressed by E.S.S.W. (Vol. ii., p. 6.), yet many persons now living must remember when spectacles such as he alludes to were by no means uncommon. An examination of the newspapers and other periodicals of the latter half of the eighteenth century would supply numerous instances in which the punishment of strangling and burning was inflicted; as well in cases of petit treason, for the murder of a husband, as more frequently in cases of coining, which, as the law then stood, was one species of high treason. I had collected a pretty long list from the _Historical Chronicle_ in the earlier volumes of the _Gentleman's Magazine_, but thought it scarcely of sufficient importance to merit insertion in "NOTES AND QUERIES." Perhaps, however, the following extracts may possess some interest: one as showing the manner in which executions of this kind were latterly performed in London, and the other as apparently furnishing an instance of later date than that which Mr. Ross considers the last in which this barbarous punishment was inflicted. The first occurs in the 56th vol. of the Magazine, Part 1. P. 524., under the date of the 21st June, 1786--