There was nothing new in this desire to gloat over the dying agonies of one’s fellow-creatures. The Roman matron cried “habet,” and turned down her thumb when the gladiator despatched his prostrate foe. Great dignitaries and high-born dames have witnessed without a shudder the tortures of an _auto da fé_; to this day it is the fashion for delicately-nurtured ladies to flock to the Law Courts, and note the varying emotions, from keenest anguish to most brutal _sangfroid_, of notorious murderers on trial.[122] It is not strange, then, that in uncultivated and comparatively demoralized ages the concourse about the gallows should be great, or the conduct of the spectators riotous, brutal, often heartless in the extreme. There was always a rush to see an execution. The crowd was extraordinary when the sufferers were persons of note or had been concerned in any much-talked-of case. Thus at the hanging of Vratz, Borosky, and Stern, convicted of that same murder of Mr. Thynne of which Count Konigsmark was acquitted,[123] an execution which took place in 1682, all London turned out to stare. The gallows had been set up in Pall Mall, the scene of the crime. “Many hundreds of standings were taken up by persons of quality and others.” The Duke of Monmouth, one of the most intimate friends of the murdered man, was among the spectators in a balcony close by the gallows, and was the cynosure of every eye, fixing the glance of even one of the convicts, Captain Vratz, who “stared at him fixedly till the drop fell.”