AROUND and within London lies a land chequered with lights and shadows, close city courts, and stifling suburban alleys, in which the sunshine only lingers for a few minutes during the day (where it seems imprisoned and in a hurry to escape above the dusky chimneys); and in this vast metropolis these scenes are contrasted with broad green, airy parks, and long lines of palace-like streets, which stretch westward and dip into the open and surrounding country. Its living crowds are ever in motion—now to witness a royal procession; then cleaving a November fog, or rolling eastward to gaze upon a “Lord Mayor’s Show;” or, while darkness still reigns over the solemn-looking streets, from its blind alleys and secluded nooks—haunts of vice and infamy—the uneducated heirs to crime and wretchedness grope their way towards Newgate, to see the black and ominous stage erected, on which a real and living actor is about to die, to glut the gaze of those who are assembled to witness this legal tragedy. From the first hour after the deep-toned bell of St. Paul’s had struck the death-knell of the departed Sabbath, the crowd began to congregate—only a few days ago—at the front of those forbidding barriers, the doors of the neighbouring coffee-houses and gin-shops were thrown open, and those who were not content to mingle with the mob below, and witness the horrible exhibition gratis, began to rush in, and bargain for their places. Then rang upon the ear the cries of “Comfortable room!” “Excellent situation!” “Beautiful prospect!” “Splendid view!” as each in turn recommended what may be termed the box-places at the windows, or the open and airy gallery on the roofs; for the pit lay dark and crowded below, and there the audience had free entrance. From every avenue this human crowd rushed in; up narrow courts, and the wide openings of the streets, they came in dusky groups, that passed through light and shadow as they crossed over where the glare of the gas-lamps fell—then merged into the dark mass of human forms on which the gloomy shadow of Newgate settled down.

All night long were the workmen busily employed in erecting the gloomy scaffold: the sound of their hammers and saws fell upon the ear at intervals; these again were drowned by the loud jeers and coarse jests which were ever and anon uttered and responded to by many in that brutal mob. One after another the huge pieces of black wood were brought out and fitted together, until high above the crowd rose the grim stage on which the death-ending drama was to be represented. Even on the countenances of those who erected the pile no expression of pity could be traced; they hammered and sawed as if they were erecting a gay mansion for the living, instead of a place on which the doomed victim was a few moments to plant his feet, look around him, and—die! The posts, which supported the planks on which so many trembling actors had trod, were fitted into the same holes in the ground—foundations which had been dug long years ago, and stood firmly, with all their load of sorrow and crime, through scores of heart-aching executions: spots which the thoughtful man never passes without heaving a sigh, and where the brutal and the vicious only congregate to jest at degraded humanity.

Ranged along the lines of the barriers, like hounds that are ever in foremost at the death, are seen those whom neither rain, snow, storm, nor darkness ever prevented from attending an execution. Their conversation is about their companions of former years—of those who were long ago imprisoned, transported, or hanged; while they alone, though often within the clutches of the law, are still at large, with all their crimes. Some of these, whose hair age and guilt have whitened, remember the days when men were hung up in a row—can tell who died basely and who bravely; and on his memory who met death in sorrow and repentance they cast reproach and shame; while he who plunged daringly into the darkness of eternity, as if he gloried in his iniquity, they hold up as an example to be followed. No rocking nor swaying of the crowd from without can remove these old idolaters of the gallows: the mass of human bodies behind may roll to and fro, like the waves of the ocean—the motion affects them not; they are anchored like rocks at the foot of the gloomy headland, which stands with its dark beam reared high above the billowy multitude. Nearly every countenance along those foremost ranks seems marked with the lines which witnessing such public executions have imprinted there—as if the very cordage had

left its twisted impress upon their visages, and the dark beam its ominous line upon their furrowed brows, giving to them the very reflex of the gallows itself, while watching its workings.

From the expression of such countenances we can see that the exhibition they are awaiting has for them no terrors; that it is but calculated to harden their hearts, by making them more familiar with the image of death; and that, instead of repenting, they are more likely to go and take away life; thus following the example which the law itself has set before their eyes. Here and there, mingled among the crowd, are seen the figures of women; some, whose countenances are marked with dissipation, yet bearing faint traces of former beauty, as if Nature was still reluctant to obliterate the fair image which she had first formed, though every trace of the pure spirit, which had once given it such light and animation, has long since perished. If they speak together in tones of pity, it is the besotted sympathy of maudlin inebriety. There is a rocking of the head, a swaying of the body, and a folding of the arms, which tell how low they have sunk,—that the once clear intellect is prostrated before the power of ardent spirits; while the crushed bonnet, the dirty shawl, the gown fastened with a single hook upon the back, and that slip-shod slovenliness of the feet, proclaim that all the pride of the woman has vanished. Girls and youths, too, are there, on whose countenances the impress of innocence is still stamped, though the white purity of the flower is sullied with the trail of the slimy soil in which it has grown. It makes the heart ache—while looking upon these stained and drooping flowers, that are growing amid such a wilderness of full-blown weeds—to reflect upon the deathly blight which must at last settle down and destroy them, unless they are transplanted by some kind and nurturing hand into a more favourable soil. Surely that law which can take away life might throw its protecting power over such as these, and a score or two of policemen be stationed to prevent them from witnessing such a scene as an execution, which is only calculated to brutalise their youthful minds. Pocket-picking, fighting, drunkenness, and profanity in almost every form, are the only examples to be picked up by these young frequenters of the gallows. No man can venture there with a kind and feeling heart, unless impelled by such motives as would lead him to plunge into a pest-house in the hope of restoring again to health some of those whom the plague has stricken down. They think not of the heart-broken relatives who have taken a last farewell as they stood within the massy and low-vaulted corridors behind that forbidding and impassable barrier of iron bars—nor of the condemned cell in which the doomed prisoner has passed so many hours of bitter remorse, looking with an inward eye of awe into that mysterious future into which he is now to be suddenly launched.

Many a mechanic, who set out with his dinner in his basket and his tools upon his back, on his way to his daily labour, is tempted by those he there meets with to stay beyond his allotted hour—until finding that it is too late to accomplish a full day’s work, he returns to some neighbouring tap-room, and so the time is passed in recounting and listening to a long history of former executions, until night and drunkenness overtake him, at the very hour when the faithful wife, having prepared his evening meal, is sitting with pale cheek patiently awaiting his return. Many an unfortunate man may date his ruin from the day he first witnessed an execution—as the first hour that threw him amid the group who haunt the foot of the gallows; and as human nature is more prone to stoop to vice than to soar aloft to virtue, so from that moment he sank never more to rise again, all his finer feelings blunted, and he himself lowering all who were once endeared to him to his own vicious standard. Such as the herds among have no pity for the dead; they pick out every sentence uttered by the witnesses in favour of the culprit who is about to suffer—they turn not to the widowed wife, the weeping children, and the once happy home which the deed he has done has left dark and desolate. They argue that drink or anger, temptation or poverty, or a weariness of life, drove him to the act, and that, saving the momentary pang which for ever ends his troubles, his last hours were soothed by kindness and attention; and that, for their parts, they would sooner prefer such an ending than to be left to die amid disease, want, neglect, and wretchedness, with no human being near to breathe a word of hope and comfort. Time after time they have witnessed the worst—have seen the law armed, and in full power strike with all its might—and turned aside without a feeling of terror. Life has been taken away before their very eyes; they have seen a fellow-creature hanged “to make an English holiday,” and they have gone and again aroused the vengeance of “Justice,” have destroyed life as they have seen it destroyed, have made that their own act and deed, which the law is more formally—for lack of other merciful modes of punishment—again compelled to follow as an example, taking life for life, and visiting evil with evil, not in a spirit of hatred or revenge, but because custom has sanctioned the necessity. Above the murmur and tumult of that noisy assembly, the lowing and bleating of cattle, as they were driven into the stalls and pens of Smithfield, fell with a strange and unnatural sound upon the ear, calling up for a few moments the tranquillity of green hill-sides, and broad, level pasture-lands, where the fever, and the fret, and the crime from crowded cities never came. What a contrast to the scene that stretched below, the cold grey dawn of the raw morning breaking upon the dark and weather-stained front of the prison, and giving to those iron-coloured and windowless walls an almost unearthly appearance. The very stones seemed to shape themselves into the faces of the dead, as if from the hard granite had started out the grey and eyeless faces of all the children of crime who had suddenly stept from that gloomy scaffold into the grave. Carts rolled by, bearing the produce of quiet fields and tree-sheltered gardens, to the market; the rustic driver turned his head for a moment; then, with eyes bent upon the ground, went musing along his way. The coach moved slowly along, severing in its course the closely-packed crowd; the warm-clad passengers glanced down the wide thoroughfare, with its dark pavement of human heads, upon the black and ominous beam that went spanning across, like the bridge of death, and ever would the same vision rise up before them all day long. They would see it in the arms of the trees which hung over the winding country-roads: it would fall like a blot upon the leaden-coloured sky, wherever a black and naked spray threw out its arm above the rounded horizon. In the rolling of the river they would hear the murmuring of the multitude; and the echo of the bridge over which they passed would send out from the mouths of its wide-spanning arches curses that would come floating deep and singly, as if from above the heads of that dimly-remembered crowd.

Hush! the unceasing murmur of the mob now breaks into a loud deep roar—a sound as if the ocean had suddenly broken through some ancient boundary, against which its ever-restless billows had for ages battered; the wide dark sea of heads is all at once in motion; each wave seems trying to overleap the other, as they are drawn onwards towards this outlet. Every link in that great human chain is shaken; along the whole lengthened lines has the motion jarred, and each in turn sees, coiled up on the floor of the scaffold, like a serpent, the hangman’s rope! The human hand that placed it there was only seen for a moment, as it lay, white and ghastly, upon the black boards, and then again was as suddenly withdrawn, as if ashamed of the deed it had done. The loud shout of the multitude once more subsided, or only fell upon the abstracted ear like the dreamy murmur of an ocean-shell. Then followed sounds more distinct and audible, in which ginger-beer, pies, fried fish, sandwiches, and fruit, were vended under the names of notorious murderers, highwaymen, and criminals, famous in the annals of Newgate for the hardihood they had displayed in the hour of execution, when they terminated their career of crime at the gallows. Threading his way among these itinerant venders, was seen the meek-faced deliverer of tracts—the man of good intentions—now bonneted, now laughed at, the skirt of his seedy black coat torn across; yet, though pulled right and left, or sent headlong into the crowd by the swing of some brutal and muscular arm, never once from that pale face passed away its benign and patient expression, but ever the same form moved along in the fulfilment of his mission, in spite of all persecution. Another fight followed the score which had already taken place; this time two women were the combatants: blinded with their long hair, they tore at each other like two furies; their bonnets and caps were trodden under foot in the kennel, and lay disregarded beside the body of the poor dog, which, while searching for its master in the crowd, was an hour before kicked to death by the savage and brutal mob.

Another deep roar, louder than any which had preceded it, broke from the multitude. Then came the cry of “Hats off!” and “Down in front!” as at a theatre. It was followed by the deep and solemn booming of the death-bell from the church of St. Sepulchre—the iron knell that rang upon the beating heart of the living man who was about to die; and, with blanched cheek and sinking heart, we turned away from the scene.

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