the spectacle is
painful, horrible; but in pain and horror there is often hidden a
certain salutariness, and the repulsion of which we are conscious is as
likely to arise from debilitation of public nerve, as from a higher
reach of public feeling. To my own thinking, it is out of this pain
and hatefulness that an execution becomes invested with an ideal
grandeur. It is sheer horror to all concerned--sheriffs, halbertmen,
chaplain, spectators, Jack Ketch, and culprit; but out of all this, and
towering behind the vulgar and hideous accessories of the scaffold,
gleams the majesty of implacable law. When every other fine morning a
dozen cut-purses were hanged at Tyburn, and when such sights did not
run very strongly against the popular current, the spectacle was
vulgar, and could be of use only to the possible cut-purses congregated
around the foot of the scaffold. Now, when the law has become so far
merciful; when the punishment of death is reserved for the murderer;
when he can be condemned only on the clearest evidence; when, as the
days draw slowly on to doom, the frightful event impending over one
stricken wretch throws its shadow over the heart of every man, woman,
and child in the great city; and when the official persons whose duty
it is to see the letter of the law carried out perform that duty at the
expense of personal pain,--a public execution is not vulgar, it becomes
positively sublime. It is dreadful, of course; but its dreadfulness
melts into pure awfulness. The attention is taken off the criminal,
and is lost in a sense of the grandeur of justice; and the spectator
who beholds an execution, solely as it appears to the eye, without
recognition of the idea which towers behind it, must be a very
unspiritual and unimaginative spectator indeed.

It is taken for granted that the spectators of public executions--the
artisans and country people who take up their stations overnight as
close to the barriers as possible, and the wealthier classes who occupy
hired windows and employ opera-glasses--are merely drawn together by a
morbid relish for horrible sights. He is a bold man who will stand
forward as the advocate of such persons--so completely is the popular
mind made up as to their tastes and motives. It is not disputed that
the large body of the mob, and of the occupants at windows, have been
drawn together by an appetite for excitement; but it is quite possible
that many come there from an impulse altog