sneers Pope, referring to an alleged habit of merely giving initials. I have turned over a fair number of the Reverend James Guthrie’s accounts of criminals. In those he always writes the name in full. The witty though himself forgotten Tom Brown scribbles the epitaph of the Reverend Samuel Smith, another Ordinary:—
Whither he’s gone
Is not certainly known,
But a man may conclude,
Without being rude,
That orthodox Sam
His flock would not shame.
And to show himself to ’em a pastor most civil,
As he led, so he followed ’em on to the d——l.
And there were the Reverend Thomas Purney, and the Reverend John Villette, but these be well-nigh empty names. We know most about the Reverend Paul Lorrain, who was appointed in 1698, and died in 1719, leaving the respectable fortune of £5000. A typical Ordinary of the baser sort this; a greedy, gross, sensual wretch, who thrived and grew fat on the perquisites of his office. Among these was a broadsheet, published at eight o’clock the morning after a hanging. It was headed, “The Ordinary of Newgate, his Account of the Behaviour, Confessions, and Last Speeches of the Malefactors who were executed at Tyburn, the—.” It gave the names and sentences of the convicts, copious notes of the sermons (of the most wooden type) he preached at them, biographies, and confessions, and finally the scenes at the gallows. Let the up-to-date journalist cherish Lorrain’s name. He was an early specimen of the personal interviewer: he had the same keen scent for unsavoury detail, the same total disregard for the feelings or wishes of his victim, the same readiness to betray confidence; and he had his subject at such an advantage! You imagine the sanctimonious air wherewith he produced his notebook and invited the wretch’s statement. With the scene at Tyburn variety in detail was impossible. “Afterwards the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off,” is his formula. You had a good twopenn’orth, such was his usual modest charge! The first page top was embellished with two cuts: on the left Old Newgate Archway, on the right Tyburn Tree. (Gurney affected a quainter design, wherein he stood, in full canonicals in the centre pointing the way to Heaven, whilst on his left the Fiend, furnished with a trident, squirmed in a bed of flames.) The broadsheet was authenticated by his signature.