This is the best Description I can give you of a Scene that was no way entertaining to me, and which I shall not again take so much Pains to see. I am, dear Brother, Yours affectionately.
Mandeville, writing some years earlier, gives an account, even more unfavourable, of the behaviour of the crowd.[212]
The batch of convicts whose execution is described by Richardson did not happen to include a highwayman. Here is a portion of Swift’s account of “Clever Tom Clinch, going to be hanged,” a piece written in 1727:—
His waistcoat, and stockings, and breeches, were white;
His cap had a new cherry ribbon to tie’t.
The maids to the doors and the balconies ran,
And said, ‘Lack-a-day, he’s a proper young man!’
But, as from the windows the ladies he spied,
Like a beau in the box, he bow’d low on each side.
Richardson’s long description may be supplemented by the chaplain’s account of the last scene:—