REGINALD.
The only drawback from the interest of this brief paper is that the writer does not state the name of the Village whence he heard the Curfew Bell.
BARBAROUS PUNISHMENTS.
It is almost inconceivable how long Fnglishmen have retained their barbarous practices. It is not more than a century since a trial for witchcraft took place in England, and hardly eighty since one occurred in Scotland. The crime of coining the King's money is still treated as treason, and women, for the commission of this crime as well as that of murdering their husbands, were sentenced to be strangled, and afterwards publicly burned. In London this horrible outrage upon civilized feelings was perpetrated in Smithfield. One of these melancholy exhibitions took place within the memory of many persons. The criminal was a fine young woman, and the strangling had not been completed, for when the flames reached her at the stake, she uttered a shriek. This produced, as it well might, a general horror, and the practice was abandoned, though the law was not abrogated. It was the mild and enlightened Sir Samuel Romilly who first brought in a bill to annul the old acts which ordered the most revolting mutilation of the corpses of traitors, agreeable to a sentence expressed in the most barbarous jargon. Mark, this was only a few years since, I believe in 1811.
What must have been the taste of our forefathers, who suffered miscreants to obtain their livelihood for the moment by stationing themselves at Temple-bar, after the rebellion in 1745, with magnifying-glasses, that the spectators might more nicely discriminate the features of those unfortunate gentlemen whose heads had been fixed over the gateway. No London populace, however tumultuary, would now for a moment tolerate such an outrage upon all that is decent and humane—(From a clever letter in the Times of April 12, by Colonel Jones.)