"A landau with six horses" was his Tyburn cart, and a silk rope his anodyne necklace"; and yet things did not go smoothly. The mob was so enormous that the journey took three hours. It was far worse than hanging, he protested to the Sheriffs. His very handsome tip of five guineas was handed by mistake to the hangman's man, and an unseemly altercation ensued. My lord toed the line with anxious care. “Am I right?" were his last words. As regards the clergy, the leading case is obviously that of Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery (27th June, 1777) The strange ups and downs of his life ("he descended so low as to become the editor of a newspaper ") are not for this page. The maudlin piety of his last days is no pleasant spectacle. Dr. Newton, bishop of Bristol, thought him deserving of pity "because hanged for the least crime he had committed." Dr. Samuel Johnson did all he could to save Dodd; also wrote his address to the Judge (sentence had been respited) in reply to the usual question, as well as the sermon he delivered in Newgate Chapel three weeks before the end. The King sternly refused a reprieve. No doubt he was right. The very manner of the deed seems to argue not a first, only a first discovered offence. Dodd's doggerel Thoughts in Prison is his chief literary crime. He went in a coach. His considerable time in praying," and "several showers of rain," rendered the mob somewhat impatient. He was assisted by two clergymen. One was very much affected; "the other, I suppose, was the Ordinary, as he was perfectly indifferent and unfeeling in everything he said and did.” Villette was then Ordinary. He wrote an account (after the most approved pattern) of Dodd's unhappy end. The pair had spent much time together in Newgate, and one hopes the report of Villette's behaviour is mistaken or inaccurate, though it is that of an eye-witness, a correspondent of George Selwyn, himself an enthusiastic amateur of executions, who, when he had a tooth drawn, let fall his handkerchief à la Tyburn, as a signal for the operation. James Boswell had a like craze. He went in a mourning coach with the Rev. James Hackman when that divine was hanged (19th April, 1779) for the murder of Miss Reay. When Hackman let fall the handkerchief it fell outside the cart, and Ketch, with an eye for perquisites, jumped down to secure it before he whipped up the horse.

It was John Austin who had the distinction of being the last person executed at Tyburn (7th November, 1783). Reformers had long denounced the procession as a public scandal. The Sheriffs

had some doubts as to their powers; but the Judges, being consulted, assured them they could end it an' they would. A month after (9th December, 1783) the gallows was at work in front of Newgate, and Old London lost its most exciting spectacle. Dr. Johnson frankly regretted the change:-" Executions are intended to draw spectators, if they do not draw spectators they lose their reason. The old method was more satisfactory to all parties. The public was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?" In truth, the change of scene was an illogical compromise: the picturesque effect was gone, save for an occasional touch, as after Holling's execution, when the dead hand was thrust into a woman's bosom, to remove a mark or wen. The disorderly mob remained, nay, was a greater scandal at the centre than in the suburbs. Dickens is but one of many writers who, knowing their London well, described the unedifying walk and talk of the crowd before Newgate; and in 1868 private was substituted for public execution throughout the land.

Tyburn and its memories, its criminals, its hangmen, its Ordinaries, filled a great space in popular imagination, and have frequent mention in our great writers. Shakespeare himself has "The shape of Love's Tyburn"; and Dryden's "Like thief and parson in a Tyburn cart," is a stock quotation. I can string no chaplet of these pearls; but two phrases I must explain. During some centuries, a felon who "prayed his clergy," was branded on the crown of his thumb with the letter T, to prevent a second use of the plea. This was called, in popular slang, the Tyburn T. Ben Jonson was so branded (October, 1598) for killing Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a duel. Again, a statute of 1698 (10 Will. III, c. 12) provided for those who prosecuted a felon to conviction a certificate freeing them from certain parochial duties. This was known as a Tyburn ticket. It had a certain money value, because if unused it could be assigned once. The privilege was abolished in 1827 (7 and 8 Geo. IV, c. 27); but it was allowed as late as 1856 to a certain Mr. Pratt, of Bond Street, who by showing his ticket (which must have been thirty years old) escaped service on an Old Bailey jury. FRANCIS WATT.*

I have derived much assistance from a scarce collection of Old Bailey Papers (1679–1729) lent me by Mr. W. R. Douthwaite, Librarian of Gray's Inn.

TH

THE WOMEN OF LYRIC
LYRIC LOVE

HIS fading century has been a fermenting rather than a progressive period in one particular phase of civilisation. Perhaps women have never been so openly scorned on the one side, while certainly they have never enjoyed such deliberate and open recognition as human beings, entitled to as much consideration and collective social kindness as male persons, on the other. Male writers are prone to wax maudlin on the subject; women, they say, should be thus and thusgenerally half angel, half idiot-because we like it so. The word chivalry is often shuttlecocked to and fro. And this is what nineteenth century chivalry amounts to-exaggerated personal homage to the few women who are young and comely, and in one's own class, with more or less contempt and aversion for the mass of womankind. So-called modern chivalry is not respect and compassion for weakness, but admiration and delight in female youth and beauty; eminently pleasant and wholesome, it does much to refine manners and give charm to social intercourse, but it is not chivalry. That fine and essentially Christian quality is an attribute, not of men only, but of every good, and many far from good, women; its foundations are in pity and love, it is part of the parental, protective instinct in either sex. The finer-natured men are growing conscious of the fatuity of this wrongly-named chivalry. Women, they are beginning to say, are our sisters; let us respect and help them as we respect and help our brothers, without pretence of especial kindness to their sex. With these feelings Browning wrote The Glove and Balaustion's Adventure.

It is scarcely too much to say that the way in which men regard women is a test of character; no good man despises or thinks ill of women. Whereupon, instantly one hears cited the grand name of Milton, the austerely virtuous, the religious, the lofty. Milton undoubtedly despised and disliked women; his highest feminine ideal was one who only worshipped as much of God as she could find in her husband-" He for God only, she for God in him." He

was a great, a sublime poet, and a great Englishman; yet a Hebrew Pharisee, his God was cruel and implacable; he was himself not a kind man. His soul was not "a star that dwelt apart": it flung itself into the turbid turmoil of his times, and was steeped in the black bitterness of Puritanism. He was a strong, not a gentle, man. The gift of tears, the grace of tenderness, the charm of human affection is not his. His great epic does not fulfil the promise of his Allegros, Penserosos, and melodious sonnets. Eve is little inferior as a poetic creation to Adam; yet the real male protagonist of Paradise Lost, Satan, is vividly human, sympathetic, and virile. The genius that produced the Ode on the Nativity and Lycidas, should have brought "all Heaven before our eyes"; but, knowing neither tears nor kindness, it chiefly brought Hell. He who is incapable of love except in the Oriental sense, is more or less than human, angel or beast; Milton was a little of both, a belated Hebrew prophet, with the sourness, but not the self-denial, of an early ascetic solitary. The moral worth of women, from the beginning of time, has been appraised by their fitness to be wives and mothers. Judged by this standard, Milton would rank low, beneath Burns, beneath even Byron ; he was a harsh father and an impossible husband, except for a

seraglio.

To think rightly of women is to know pity, to love chastity, and to be capable of reverence.

For we ought first to think on what manere

They bringe us forth, and what peyne they endure,
First in our birth, and sith from yere to yere

How busely they done hir busie cure,

To keepe us from every mis-aventure

In our youth, whan we have no might :

thus he wrote who made the Legende of Good Women, and created more noble and lovable female characters than any poet except Shakspere. Also

And for our sake ful ofte they suffer sore.

Women, Chaucer says, are the cause of all our joy, and of all the refinement, "lightnesse," that is, lightsomeness, of life, and

Of knighthood, norture, eschewing all mallis,
Encrese of worship and of all worthinesse ;

Thereto curteis, and meke and ground of al goodnesse.

This love of Chaucer's is tinged, but very faintly, by Madonna

worship, as well as by the fantastic exaggeration of troubadours, trouveres, and Minnesingers; but it is always sober and sincere, colouring everything he writes. It is more practical, less ideal than the mystic, poetic exaltation of Dante and Petrarch. His reverence for good women and sympathy with all, springs from a profound knowledge of human nature, and a large and generous heart. So with Shakspere. Both were men of the world, as well as great poets; both were good but not perfect men, full-blooded, genial, and eager and welcome guests at the banquet of life. Both were endowed with intellects of the first order, perfectly sane and serene, both acknowledged to be among the greatest delineators of human character and emotion. Each crested a mighty wave of advancing civilisation; the back-draught of Chaucer's wave was iiterary pause and civil wars, that of Shakspere, the Puritanism that dragged Milton with it, thundering down into another and fiercer civil war. Neither poet stood alone, but was eminent among many. Chaucer was the finest English bloom of that first European renascence of which the earliest signs are in the tenth century and the culmination in the twelfth and thirteenth; Shakspere the English crown and consummation of the second and greater renascence. He who created Lady Macbeth

is, no more than Chaucer, no blind worshipper of her sex. Dramatists can speak only by inference; it may have been noticed that the nobility of Shakspere's men is to a certain degree measurable by their estimation of women. How vilely that husband of Mariana's speaks in Measure for Measure! How certain we are that Benedick is a good man when he sides with Hero,-incredulous of the slander! The advance of modern, which is mainly Christian, civilisation is marked by increasing spirituality of marriage. Spenser, especially in the Epithalamion, reaches a high level, but it is in Let me not to the marriage of true minds, that the newer and more Christian views are gathered up and tersely presented. Marriage has never since Shakspere fallen to so low a level as in pagan and early ascetic Christian days, though it receded with the back-draught of that great wave of sixteenth century enlightenment to Puritan savagery and Restoration profligacy, to be gathered slowly but steadily on the advancing tide into a greater billow, breaking in the present century and rolling in fullest force in the middle Victorian age in the poetry of Browning and Rossetti, who gave it tenderness and intellectual charm. Between these two grand poetic periods, the progress of civilisation in England was