[166] I have been told that the dealers in perjury at Westminster Hall, as well as the Old Bailey, consider this little circumstance as a complete salvo for false swearing.
[167] A solemn exhortation was formerly given to the prisoners appointed to die at Tyburn, in their way from Newgate. Mr. Robert Dow, merchant tailor, who died in 1612, left £1, 6s. 8d. yearly for ever, that the bellman should deliver to the unhappy criminals, as they went by in the cart, a most pious and awful admonition. An admonition of the same nature was read in the prison of Newgate the night before they suffered.
[168] A man that some persons now living may remember by the name of Tiddy Doll.
[169] Notwithstanding the boasted humanity of our laws, I am told more criminals are annually executed in this little island than in all Europe besides.
[170] I believe it was customary to despatch a second pigeon at the moment the criminal suffered.
[171] Numerous as are the executions, they are not sufficient for the anatomical students. It is not more than four or five years since one of those necessary assistants to the art of chirurgery, called resurrection men, being employed in his vocation of stealing a dead body from a churchyard in the neighbourhood of London, was discovered by a patrole, and shot in the grave. To prevent his employer being disappointed of a subject, and to show her reverence for that art which her husband had lost his life in endeavouring to improve, and save the idle expense of a funeral, his afflicted widow, with the fondness of an Ephesian matron, three days afterwards sold the body of her murdered lord for sixteen shillings, to the very surgeon in whose service he had suffered!
[172] When Oliver Cromwell, attended by Thurlow, once went to dine in the city, the populace rent the air with their gratulations. "Your highness," said the secretary, "may see by this that you have the voice of the people as well as the voice of God."—"As to God," replied the Protector, "I will not talk about Him here; but for the people, they would be more noisy, and more joyful too, if you and I were going to be hanged."
[173] He is somewhat like a porter butt, with a head on it. In the Straits of Thermopylæ he would have been pressed to death; but dead, he might stop a breach better than a better man.
[174] In the second volume of Wood's Body of Conveyancing, p. 180, is a London lease; one of the clauses gives a right to the landlord and his friends to stand in the balcony during the time of "the shows or pastimes upon the day commonly called the Lord Mayor's Day."
[175] In the General Advertiser for March 9, 1748-49, it was thus announced: