ether different. Just
consider the nature of the expected sight,--a man in tolerable health
probably, in possession of all his faculties, perfectly able to realise
his position, conscious that for him this world and the next are so
near that only a few seconds divide them--such a man stands in the
seeing of several thousand eyes. He is so peculiarly circumstanced, so
utterly lonely,--hearing the tolling of his own death-bell, yet living,
wearing the mourning clothes for his own funeral,--that he holds the
multitude together by a shuddering fascination. The sight is a
peculiar one, you must admit, and every peculiarity has its
attractions. Your volcano is more attractive than your ordinary
mountain. Then consider the unappeasable curiosity as to death which
haunts every human being, and how pathetic that curiosity is, in so far
as it suggests our own ignorance and helplessness, and we see at once
that people _may_ flock to public executions for other purposes than
the gratification of morbid tastes: that they would pluck if they could
some little knowledge of what death is; that imaginatively they attempt
to reach to it, to touch and handle it through an experience which is
not their own. It is some obscure desire of this kind, a movement of
curiosity not altogether ignoble, but in some degree pathetic; some
rude attempt of the imagination to wrest from the death of the criminal
information as to the great secret in which each is profoundly
interested, which draws around the scaffold people from the country
harvest-fields, and from the streets and alleys of the town. Nothing
interests men so much as death. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale
it. "A greater crowd would come to see me hanged," Cromwell is
reported to have said when the populace came forth on a public
occasion. The Lord Protector was right in a sense of which, perhaps,
at the moment he was not aware. Death is greater than official
position. When a man has to die, he may safely dispense with stars and
ribbands. He is invested with a greater dignity than is held in the
gift of kings. A greater crowd _would_ have gathered to see Cromwell
hanged, but the compliment would have been paid to death rather than to
Cromwell. Never were the motions of Charles I. so scrutinised as when
he stood for a few moments on the scaffold that winter morning at
Whitehall. King Louis was no great orator usually, but when on the 2d
January, 1793, he attempted to s