e extraordinary than Lieutenant H----,
then denominated the "walking gallows;"--and such he certainly was,
literally and practically.

Lieutenant H---- was an officer of the line on half pay. His brother was
one of the solicitors to the Crown--a quiet, tremulous, _vino deditus_
sort of man, and a leading Orangeman;--his widow who afterwards married
and survived a learned doctor, was a clever, positive, good-looking
Englishwoman, and, I think, fixed the doctor's avowed _creed_: as to his
genuine _faith_, that was of little consequence.

Lieutenant H---- was about six feet two inches high;--strong, and broad
in proportion. His strength was great, but of the dead kind
unaccompanied by activity. He could lift a ton, but could not leap a
rivulet; he looked mild, and his address was civil--neither assuming nor
at all ferocious. I knew him well, and from his countenance should never
have suspected him of cruelty; but so cold-blooded and so eccentric an
executioner of the human race I believe never yet existed, save among
the American Indians.[6]

[6] His mode of execution being perfectly novel, and at the same
time _ingenious_, Curran said, "The lieutenant should have got a
patent for cheap strangulation."

His inducement to the strange barbarity he practised I can scarcely
conceive; unless it proceeded from that natural taint of cruelty which
so often distinguishes man above all other animals when his power
becomes uncontrolled. The propensity was probably strengthened in him
from the indemnities of martial law, and by those visions of promotion
whereby violent partizans are perpetually urged, and so frequently
disappointed.

At the period alluded to, law being suspended, and the courts of justice
closed, the "question" by torture was revived and largely practised. The
commercial exchange of Dublin formed a place of execution; even
_suspected_ rebels were every day immolated as if _convicted_ on the
clearest evidence; and Lieutenant H----'s _pastime_ of hanging _on his
own back_ persons whose physiognomies he thought characteristic of
rebellion was (I am ashamed to say) the subject of jocularity instead of
punishment. What in other times he would himself have died for, as a
murderer, was laughed at as the manifestation of loyalty: never yet was
martial law so abused, or its enormities so hushed up as in Ireland.
Being a military officer, the lieutenant conceived he had a right to do
just what he thought prop