It seems, collating this and other authorities, that this interesting young man had been given the advantages of "a Christian and Gentlemanlike Education," which in this case means that he had been a Westminster boy under the renowned Dr. Busby, and afterwards a scholar at Eton. This finished Christian then became a lieutenant in the Marquis of Winchester's Horse. He married when twenty years of age, and his wife died a year later, when he plunged into a dissolute life in London. One evening in September, 1718, he was driven "with a woman in a coach and a bottle of Champain wine" to a "bagnio" in Silver Street, Golden Square, and there "had the misfortune" to run a waiter, one Samuel Loxton, through the body with his sword. "G--d d--n you, I will murder you all," he is reported to have threatened, and a farrier of Putney, called at the subsequent trial, deposed to having once been run through the body by this martial spirit. Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were in those times very much what German officers became--privileged murderers--and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all. [Sidenote: AN EXIT AT TYBURN] At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the Ordinary, saying "He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses." The Ordinary does not tell us in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution, taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that interesting event. He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree, talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles' Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available, he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, "Gentlemen, I wish your health," and then "was ty'd up, turned off, and bled very much at the Mouth or Nose, or both."