for the reason assigned by that excellent lawyer, Sir Thomas Smith, who, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, tells us that "it is the nature of the Englishman to abide no torment, and that, therefore, he will confess himself rather to have done anything, yea, to have killed his own father, than to suffer torment." Nevertheless, this old island has witnessed too much evil of the kind. Our kings, certainly, did not go quite so far in defining treason as Dionysius, who included dreams in the catalogue of capital offences, but some of them effected a very close approximation-notably that Achilles, Edward IV., who put one man to death for a jest, and another for a petulant remark. And it is with anything rather than the self-satisfaction of Britons that we peruse that passage of Sir Edward Coke's which explains hang

tural principles, and justifies them by patriarchal precedent, or certain statutes of “Bluff Harry's," or those pages of our history which tell us how one of our kings placed a fami

insolvent tributaries by suspending them, head downwards, in the offensive smoke of a fire fed by noxious weeds. And a third, Constans II., having in vain endeavored to soothe the jealousy excited in his brother Theodosius by consigning him to the priesthood, at length murdered the unfortunate youth in one of the atrocious ways peculiar to the East. But the crime was too horrible for even the Greeks of that blood-stained capital-habituated, to tolerate as they were, to the daily perpetration of similar deeds, and rising indignant, they drove the assassin from his capital. But not into security. A vengeance far surpassing any they could have inflicted thenceforward shared his exile, nor ever left his side even for an instant until the distant hour of his own murder. Then only did the phantom of his victim cease to present its chalice filled with blooding, drawing, and disembowelling on scripto the murderer's lips, and to appal his ear with the terrible invitation, "Drink, brother, drink! drink, brother, drink!" But we must not linger over that sink of depravity the Lower Empire, or we shall feel the pois-ly under the scaffold that they might be wetonous influence of its exhalations; like Ducange, for instance, who discusses with too evident relish the various methods devised, under the patronage of the Byzantine rulers, for extinguishing the sight. We merely pause to remark that one of the most used of these imperial punishments, the amputation of the tongue, originated a "miracle" that of speech without tongues which edified the orthodox of the fifth century, confounded the Arian persecutors who had recourse to it, and exceedingly bothered the historian Gibbon. That writer, unable to controvert the evidence adduced in favor of the marvel, very characteristically insinuates that he has as good a right to be obstinate in doubt as the Arians. Questionless, he would have exulted had he known that the "miracle" was no miracle at all, but a common occurrence in the East, where the punishment has been practised beyond memory to this extent, the amputation of half the organ, and where those who have fortitude enough to encounter the pain and risk attending total excision, recover the powers of speech lost by the former operation.

England, we rejoice to write, offers fewer examples of these abominations than any other country, though, we hope, not exactly

ted by their father's blood; how another, and a hero, allowed the gallant Lord Cobham to unite in his death the various penalties decreed agains: treason and heresy; and how a third permitted the previously unheard of punishment of boiling alive to be inflicted on the cook of "saintly Fisher."

All this infamous variety of torture and death was at the unlimited disposal of every one of the thousand tyrants whose mad whim was law in the terrible Middle Ages. And an untimely display of virtue, valor, or selfrespect, was far more certain than outrageous villainy to bring their vengeace down. Alain Blanchard was beheaded by Henry V. for his heroic defense of his native city, Rouen; 400 of the English garrison were tied in couples and drowned in the Sienne for their stubborn resistance at Pontoise; Albert Bieling ennobled the murderous squabbles of the "Hooks and Codfish "by his conduct when doomed to be buried alivesentence having been pronounced, he asked and obtained, not mitigation, but a month's respite to take leave of his family, and returned at the expiration of the period to undergo his fate. One of the Raugrafs of Hardenburgh quarreled with the abbot of a neighboring monastery, made him prisoner,

set his abbey on fire, and carrying the captive churchman to the battlements of his castle, took good care that he should not avert his eyes from the unpleasant spectacle by building his head into the wall The monks of Glastonbury having vexed their abbot, Tonstain, by obstinately refusing to learn a new chant, the latter at last added the persuasions of a band of men-at-arms to his own, and these gentlemen soon managed to make the monks change their tune by slaughtering eighteen of them. "Take care of him," said Charles the Mad, nodding towards a knight, who appeared to pass him on the high road with some diminution of respect, and immediately the gentleman was pursued, tied up in a sack, and thrown into the next river. And the same fate, but rather more justly, was inflicted on the Bastard of Bourbon by Charles the Wise. John Gof fredi, who abandoned the office of bishop to earn the title of the "Devil of Arras," performed the following hideous exploit at the instigation of Louis XI. The Count of Armagnac, a man of many crimes, sought shelter from the vengeance of his king in the strong castle of Lectour. But the Devil of Arras got in by swearing solemnly to a capitulation. Breaking his oath the next moment, he stabbed the count in the arms of his wife, poisoned the latter, and, to destroy all evidence of his perfidy, exterminated the inhabitants of the district. That same Louis was in the habit of ornamenting the approaches to his castle of Plessis les Tours by long rows of bodies suspended from the trees. Nor was this an exclusively royal pastime. In troublous times almost any petty captain could indulge in it. Outside of Meaux stood, until very recently, the stump of a tree much patronized in the days of long ago by one of those amiable cavaliers called the Bastard of Vaurus. This gentle knight was accustomed to dispose of his prisoners among the branches of this tree, and from one of these same branches he finally dangled himself, by the just sentence of our Henry V. "The Oak of Reformation," too, at Norwich, was similarly and largely used by Roman Catholic rebel and Protestant avengers in the days of Edward VI.

ders crowned a life of profligacy and a reign of tyranny by denouncing her own father as an imposter, and putting him to a shameful death after the infliction of exquisite torture. The Duke of Albany starved his nephew, Joan of Naples had the first of her four husbands smothered between two mattresses, and suffered a similar fate. Louis le Hutin had his queen Margaret strangled with a napkin. But the list is endless, and as we have no desire to compile a mere catalogue of horror; with one more specimen we shall gladly take leave of these enormous perversions of justice.

Francis I. of Britanny was worthy of the era that produced Louis XI., Richard of Glouster, the Devil of Arras, and Oliver le Dain; and so was his minister, Arthur de Montaubin. The last was probably the most odiously wicked man of his day; but that did not prevent him from taking orders, nor from dying quietly an archbishop. This minion quarreled with Prince Gilles, younger brother of the duke, because the heiress of Dinant had preferred the prince to himself. Incited by his favorite, the duke imprisoned his brother, and endeavored to do him legally to death. False witnesses in plenty were not wanting; but the case was one of those that now and then take strong hold of the public; and, besides, Gilles had powerful friends, and, what was much the same thing, Montaubin inveterate enemies; so no tribunal could be tempted or threatened into pronouncing a capital sentence. The duke then transferred his brother secretly from prison, and thus baffled sympathy until, by the end of the third year, it had pretty nearly subsided. Judging the proper time to have come, the duke instructed the Castellan of Hardovinage, the prince's last gaoler, to put his prisoner to death. That worthy, Olivier de Miel by name, first tried starvation. But unfortunately for the success of this plan, the grated window of the dungeon looked into the castle ditch, where a poor woman gathering sticks was attracted by the prince's groans, and discovered his situation. She did all she could for him without endangering herself-supplied him stealthily and under cover of night with a little coarse bread Favorites, brothers, wives, and husbands and water, and brought a priest as poor were variously destroyed without exciting as herself to administer spiritual comfort any sensation. The Countess Jane of Flan-through the grating. Astonished, after the

to do than just to fasten a noose and draw a bolt. The attitude of the prisoner in the cart, the order of the fatal procession, the arrangement of the scaffold and its trappings, and the disposition of the assistants, requir ed the minutest attention. The torture chamber, too, with its various appliances, could not be entrusted to a clumsy valet. And as faction very often brought the noble himself in contact with the executioner, it was necessary that the latter should have a delicate perception of the nice gradations of rank, and be capable of applying his tools with duly respectful demeanor to the sacred person of nobility. Indeed, polite phrases, neat compliments, and well-turned allusions to former achievements dropped nowhere so glibly as on the scaffold and from the lips of Master John Ketch. And this gentlemanfor such, in some countries, the fall of a certain number of heads made him-prided himself as much on his skill with his weapons as any other gentleman of his time. Nor was it without reason. More than once has the trunk been known to remain erect for some minutes after the fatal stroke, as if unconscious of its loss. The Constable St. Pol was one of those who were decapitated thus dexterously; but it must be admitted that Little John, who struck the blow, was a master in his craft. Carnifex nascitur non

lapse of many weeks, that the prisoner diddle Ages. But then he had something more not die, the gaoler next tried poison, and that, too, proving ineffectual, as a last resource, he had the prince smothered between two mattresses, and then announced that he had died from apoplexy. The duke was besieging Avranches when informed of his brother's death, and the news drove him at once to his quarters. On his way thither he was arrested by the friar who had acted as the prince's confessor. Laying his hand on the duke's bridle, and raising his voice to its loudest pitch, the priest solemnly cited the duke, in the name of the murdered man, to appear, within forty days, before the judgment-seat of God, and there answer for his crime. Smitten by the terrible summons, the duke put his house in order, appointed his remaining brother to succeed him, and died within the time specified. That is the record. Similar appeals were addressedone in 1812, to Ferdinand of Castile, therefore called "el Citado,” by the brothers Carvajal, whom he had sentenced to be thrown from a rock on a very dubious charge of murder; another in 1814, to Pope Clement V. and Philip the Fair, by Jaques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars, who, as he stood bound with the last batch of the doomed knights on the pile to which the executioner was just applying the torch, startled the crowds that had gathered in the April twilight to witness the spectacle, by adjur-fit is just as true as the other reading, and ing his oppressors to meet him, within the year, in the presence of that Judge whose justice knew no bias.

the worthy we have named was a born hangman. His intuitive grace and skill in all that concerned the scaffold excited the unAnd yet with all this atrocity it cannot be qualified admiration of all his contemporasaid that the Law was disregarded during ries, and placed him, while yet in his teens, the Middle Ages. Far from it-it was only at the very summit of his profession. But, too active and powerful when invoked by like many another brilliant genius, he was the strong. Indeed, in those aristocratic doomed to an early grave. He quarrelled times, Law was the greatest aristocrat of all, with a certain carpenter-one Ouden de just as during the Reign of Terror it was Bust-over a disputed account, probably the thoroughest revolutionist. And it arro- concerning repairs done to the gallows, for gated to itself the most extraordiary rights it is preposterous to suppose that such a man and immunities. Feeling a lack of intrinsic as Little John would degrade himself by asworth, it endeavored to make amends for sociating with a mere vulgar wood-shaver, the deficiency like many another pretender, especially as another knight of the noose, by an imposing presence. It had as many and chiefly on account of his trade, had been petty observances as the Church herself-it selected not long before as a fit and proper clung as tenaciously to every one of them, companion by the Emperor Wenceslaus. But and the executioner was its master of the that as it may, the rpenter took his punceremonies. Yes, Jack Ketch, detested as ishment to heart, and determined on revenge. he is now, was a great character in the Mid- | Accordingly, one mo.light night, not very