clutching the clerks' seat, and struggling, against the grasp of the officers, to get forward to the bench, on which the judge sat adjusting the black cap with a view to pronounce the sentence of death. The roused judge vociferated to the officers, blaming them for their remissness; but his voice was overcome by the ejaculations of the prisoner, who cried for mercy, till, vanquished by the men, who held him firmly down, and even stopped his mouth, he fell senseless within the bar, deaf to the words of the fatal sentence, which now, in the midst of death-like silence, rolled over the court with a solemnity never perhaps witnessed in any place of justice before or since. On being carried to the jail, whither I accompanied him at the request of the judge, he was with difficulty brought back to a state of consciousness; but it was only to be able to fill the prison with his unavailing cries. I could do him no good; and, though used to exhibitions of pain and misery, I was unable to witness longer this most intensive picture of the most agonized condition of unhappy man. I left him, but I was repeatedly called to him again, in the interval which elapsed between this period and the day of his execution, to bring the strength of our art to bear against the effects of a determination to refuse all sustenance, and to resist all the confirmatory aids of necessity, resignation, and religion. All the efforts of the jailor were not able to get him to take food; the unabated strength of his despair occupied every nerve, and chased from his mind all lesser pains of hunger or bodily privations and wants; his moral apoplexy had extended its deadening effects to his physical system; and, as he lay chained by the leg to his stone couch, it could have been detected only from low murmuring groans, alternated, at long intervals, with sudden yells, that there was any real living action in his mind or body. The ministrations of the clergymen who attended him were likely to be of greater service to him than anything within the power of our professional art; yet they informed me that such was the force of the agony under which he laboured, that all their efforts had been unavailing to introduce into his mind any one sustaining or comforting principle or sentiment. For many days, his determination to take no food continued as strong as at the beginning, whereby his whole system became emaciated and deranged; and, even when the burning pangs of hunger and thirst, the most acute of all bodily pains, rose upon him to such a height that his moral anguish was forced, for a moment, to cede some portion of the territory of feeling to their irresistible impulse, he gave way to the imperative necessity like a maniac, starting up and seizing the can of water that stood by his couch, and, after draining it to the bottom, dashing it from him, and falling back again into the depth of his misery.