“for civility-money in placing their halters’ knot right under their left ear, and separating their quarters with all imaginable decency.” Ketch’s fancy hovered between a noble and a highwayman. My Lord was never stingy with tips; ’twere unseasonable and quite against the traditions of his order. And the foppery of the other made him a bird worth plucking. I do not pretend to give a complete catalogue of these rascals, yet two others I must mention: John Price (1718) was arrested for murder as he was escorting, it is said, a felon to Tyburn. It was a brutal business, and he richly deserved the halter. He got it too! John Dennis led the attack on Newgate in the Lord George Gordon No-Popery Riots (_temp._ 1780, but of course you remember your _Barnaby Rudge_). He was like to have swung himself, but was continued in his old occupation on condition of stringing up his fellow-rioters. Of old time the Hangman was (we are assured) sworn on the Book to dispatch every criminal without favour to father or relative or friend; and he was then dismissed with this formula:--“Get thee hence, wretch.” I have noted the unwillingness to admit him into Newgate--his wages were paid over the gate--and the sorry condition of his equipage. This last gave a grotesque touch to his progress, readily seized on by the jeering mob, which had ever a curse or a missile for the scowling wretch. In the centuries of its horrible virility, the Tree at Tyburn slew its tens of thousands. A record of famous cases would fill volumes. I can but note a very few. The earliest recorded, though they cannot have been the first, were those of Judge Tressilian and Nicholas Brembre, in February 1388. Their offence was high treason, which meant in that primitive time little more than a political difference with the authorities. This Brembre had been four times Mayor of London. He proposed some startling innovations in the city, one being to change its name to New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth perchance had turned his head). Here ended Perkin Warbeck, that “little cockatrice of a king” on whom Bacon lavishes such wealth of vituperative rhetoric, after abusing Henry VII.’s generosity more than once. The savagery of Henry VIII. kept the executioner busy, and he of Tyburn had his full share. On May 4, 1535, in open defiance to every past tradition, the King caused hang and quarter Haughton, the last prior of the Charterhouse, in his sacerdotal robes, without any previous ceremony of degradation, after which “his arm was hung as a bloody sign over the archway of the Charterhouse.” In 1581, under Elizabeth, Campion and Harte continued the long line of catholic martyrs. Campion had been so cruelly racked that he could not hold up his hand to plead without assistance, yet he maintained his courage through the raw December morning whereon he suffered. At Tyburn they vexed him with long discussions; but at last, while he was yet praying for Elizabeth, the cart drove away. Many of