A holiday of butchery, cries Mercy; yea, and more, a holiday in which butchery alone has a part, giving naught that chance or strength or valour might lend its victim; butchery a thousand times more squalid than that of the noble Roman. Ah, but it is the pious retribution of majestic laws, declares the spirit of those times; the just conclusion of the social contract; butchery, alas! for these poor victims can have no resemblance to the gladiators of the arena. Yes, indeed, retorts Mercy; it is the vengeance of the sacred majesty of commerce, whose garments have been soiled by the hands of these malefactors, which cannot be appeased by the code of savages, an eye for an eye, a life for a life. Yet ’tis stern for the sake of utility, pleads the spirit; harsh for the public good, so that the evil-doer may be terrified to the advantage of all innocence, and to the encouragement of a Christian life. But what of that handsome youth, is the reply, whose face is seared by vice, and whose hand is in the fob of your sleek, well-fed City merchant: is this one dismayed by these six dangling victims on the tree? No, answers the spirit; but we must not adopt a universal conclusion from a particular case, for how can we judge how many of the tempted have been saved from crime by the terrible example of the fatal rope? True in logic, false in truth, Mercy well may thunder--a valid deduction from _conditional_ premiss, but the terms of jurisprudence should not be qualified by an ‘if’ Thus, surely, unless we admit the old Hebrew ‘eye for an eye’ dogma, must we view all legal punishments that deprive a fellow-creature of his life. Alas, that we are controlled by the logic of other times! The same coach that conveyed William Wynne Ryland along the road to Tyburn brought back his dead body to his friends. Five days later--on Thursday, the 3rd of September--they took him to the tiny churchyard of Feltham, beyond Hounslow, where his father and mother had been laid to rest. For a long time after his death Mrs Ryland continued to keep a print-shop at the corner of Berners Street, where her husband’s engravings commanded a large sale. Subsequently she transferred her business to New Bond Street. From contemporary newspapers we learn that the Ryland plates were much sought after in Paris when his untimely fate became known. Nine years later, on the 20th of October 1792, the unhappy wife went to join her husband in the little grass-plot of the village by the Thames.