an reader is the horrible nature and
atrocious effect of a public execution.

A few Sunday evenings since I was passing by Newgate, along the outside
of which a considerable crowd had been collected. Respectable mechanics,
with their wives and children, were staring at its dreary stone walls.
Ragged boys and girls were romping and laughing in the streets. All the
neighbouring public-houses were filled with a tipsy crowd. Here and
there a few barriers had been erected, and workmen were engaged in
putting up more. Why were these preparations made? For what purpose had
this crowd collected? A man was to be hung, was the reply. I resolved
for once to see the tragedy performed. To me or the living mass around,
that man was an utter stranger. I had never seen him or heard the sound
of his voice; all I knew was that he had led an outlaw's life, and was to
die as outlaws ofttimes do. How strange the mysterious interest with
which death clothes everything it touches! Is it that looking at a man
so soon to have done with life we fancy we can better pry into the great
secret? Do we deem that seeing him struggle we shall die more manfully
ourselves, or is it merely the vague interest with which we regard any
one about to travel into distant regions, all unknown to him or us, and
the secrets of which he can never return to tell? Be this as it may, I
went back at twelve. The public-houses had been closed, decent people
had gone home to bed; but already the crowd had become denser, already
had the thief and the bully from all the slums and stews of the
metropolis been collected together. You can easily recognise the
criminal population of our capital. The policeman knows them
instinctively, as with their small wiry figures, restless eyes, and pale
faces, they pass him by. One can tell them as easily as one knows the
child of Norman origin by his noble bearing, or the Anglo-Saxon by his
blue eyes and rosy cheeks. There is generally something fine, and
genial, and hearty about an English mob. On the night of the
peace-rejoicing you might have taken a lady from one end of London to the
other, and she would not have heard an objectionable word, or been
inconvenienced in the least; but the mob of which I now write seemed
utterly repulsive and reprobate; all its sympathies seemed perverted. It
is a hard world this, I know, and it has but little mercy for the erring
and the unfortunate; but that they should regard it with