Between two and three A.M., on the morning of January 20, 1766, a mysterious man was arrested by the watch as he was discharging, by the dim light, musket bullets at the two heads then remaining upon Temple Bar. On being questioned by the puzzled magistrate, he affected a disorder in his senses, and craftily declared that the patriotic reason for his eccentric conduct was his strong attachment to the present Government, and that he thought it not sufficient that a traitor should merely suffer death; that this provoked his indignation, and it had been his constant practice for three nights past to amuse himself in the same manner. "And it is much to be feared," says the past record of the event, "that the man is a near relation to one of the unhappy sufferers." Upon searching this very suspicious marksman, about fifty musket bullets were found on him, wrapped up in a paper on which was written the motto, "Eripuit ille vitam." After this, history leaves the heads of the unhappy Jacobites--those lips that love had kissed, those cheeks children had patted--to moulder on in the sun and in the rain, till the last day of March, 1772, when one of them (Townley or Fletcher) fell. The last stormy gust of March threw it down, and a short time after a strong wind blew down the other; and against the sky no more relics remained of a barbarous and unchristian revenge. In April, 1773, Boswell, whom we all despise and all like, dined at courtly Mr. Beauclerk's with Dr. Johnson, Lord Charlemont (Hogarth's friend), Sir Joshua Reynolds, and other members of the literary club, in Gerrard Street, Soho, it being the awful evening when Boswell was to be balloted for. The conversation turned on the new and commendable practice of erecting monuments to great men in St. Paul's. The Doctor observed: "I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. Whilst we stood at Poet's Corner, I said to him,-- "Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."--OVID. When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, and pointing to the heads upon it, slily whispered,-- "Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur _istis_." This anecdote, so full of clever, arch wit, is sufficient to endear the old gateway to all lovers of Johnson and of Goldsmith. According to Mr. Timbs, in his "London and Westminster," Mrs. Black, the wife of the editor of the _Morning Chronicle_, when asked if she remembered any heads on Temple Bar, used to reply, in her brusque, hearty way, "_Boys, I recollect the scene well!_ I have seen on that Temple Bar, about which you ask, two human heads--real heads--traitors' heads--spiked on iron poles. There were two; I saw one fall (March 31, 1772). Women shrieked as it fell; men, as I have heard, shrieked. One woman near me fainted. Yes, boys, I recollect seeing human heads upon Temple Bar."