Temple Bar, the City Golgotha," representing the Bar with three heads
on the top of it, spiked on long iron rods. The devil looks down in
ribald triumph from above, and waves a rebel banner, on which, besides
three coffins and a crown, is the motto, "A crown or a grave."
Underneath are written these patriotic but doggrel lines:--

"Observe the banner which would all enslave,
Which misled traytors did so proudly wave:
The devil seems the project to surprise;
A fiend confused from off the trophy flies.

While trembling rebels at the fabric gaze,
And dread their fate with horror and amaze,
Let Britain's sons the emblematic view,
And plainly see what is rebellion's due."

The heads of Fletcher and Townley were put on the Bar August 12, 1746.
On August 15th Horace Walpole, writing to a friend, says he had just
been roaming in the City, and "passed under the new heads on Temple Bar,
where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look."
According to Mr. J.T. Smith, an old man living in 1825 remembered the
last heads on Temple Bar being visible through a telescope across the
space between the Bar and Leicester Fields.

Between two and three A.M., on the morning of January 20, 1766, a
mysterious man was arrested by the watch as he was discharging, by the
dim light, musket bullets at the two heads then remaining upon Temple
Bar. On being questioned by the puzzled magistrate, he affected a
disorder in his senses, and craftily declared that the patriotic reason
for his eccentric conduct was his strong attachment to the present
Government, and that he thought it not sufficient that a traitor should
merely suffer death; that this provoked his indignation, and it had been
his constant practice for three nights past to amuse himself in the same
manner. "And it is much to be feared," says the past record of the
event, "that the man is a near relation to one of the unhappy
sufferers." Upon searching this very suspicious marksman, about fifty
musket bullets were found on him, wrapped up in a paper on which was
written the motto, "Eripuit ille vitam."

After this, history leaves the heads of the unhappy Jacobites--those
lips that love had kissed, those cheeks children had patted--to moulder
on in the sun and in the rain, till the last day of March, 1772, when
one of them (Townley or Fletcher) fell. The last stormy gust of March
threw it down, and a short time after a strong wind blew