If, to quote Blackstone, “punishment of unreasonable severity” with a view to “preventing crimes and amending the manners of a people” constitute a specific form of tyranny, the fact that in 1795, the year of Rowland Hill's birth, the pillory, the stocks, and the whipping-post were still in use sufficiently attests this “unreasonable severity.” In March 1789, less than seven years before his birth, a yet more terrible punishment was still in force. A woman—the last thus “judicially murdered”—was burnt at the stake; and a writer in _Notes and Queries_, of 21st September 1851, tells its readers that he was present on the occasion. Her offence was coining, and she was mercifully strangled before being executed. Women were burnt at the stake long after that awful death penalty was abolished in the case of the more favoured sex. The savage cruelty of the criminal code at this time and later is also indicated by the fact that over 150 offences were punishable by death. Even in 1822, a date within the recollection of persons still living, and notwithstanding the efforts made by Sir Samuel Romilly and others to humanise that code, capital punishment was still terribly common. In that year, on two consecutive Monday mornings, my father, arriving by coach in London from Birmingham, passed within sight of Newgate. Outside its walls, on the first occasion, the horrified passengers counted nineteen bodies hanging in a row; on the second, twenty-one. During my father's childhood and youth this country was almost constantly engaged in war. Within half a mile of my grandfather's house the forging of gun barrels went on all but incessantly, the work beginning before dawn and lasting till long after nightfall. The scarcely-ending din of the hammers was varied only by the occasional rattle from the proof shed; and the shocks and jars had disastrous effect upon my grandmother's brewings of beer. Meanwhile “The Great Shadow,” graphically depicted by Sir A. Conan Doyle, was an actual dread that darkened our land for years. And the shadow of press-gang raids was a yet greater dread alike to the men who encountered them, sometimes to disappear for ever, and to the women who were frequently bereft of their bread-winners. It is, however, pleasant to remember that sometimes the would-be captors became the captured. A merchant vessel lying in quarantine in Southampton Water, her yellow flag duly displayed, but hanging in the calm weather so limply that it was hardly observable, was boarded by a press-gang who thought to do a clever thing by impressing some of the sailors. These, seeing what was the invaders' errand, let them come peaceably on deck, when the quarantine officer took possession of boat and gang, and detained both for six weeks.