casement. He looks at the work of the Hangman; and stupified, sick with terror, he tumbles in a heap upon the floor. The landlord, very considerately, has the stranger removed up-stairs: he is put to bed; falls into a dose; sleeps for an hour, might have slept longer, but that he is awakened by the chorus below, led by the man who gave Mike the order for brandy and tobacco; the chorus bellowing "And now I am cut off in the height of my prime!" Such are the rewards of the Hangman; such the feelings and thoughts of his countrymen; such his recompence when, on the public scaffold he throttles a man before thousands of lookers-on, to shew to them the sacredness of human life; to make known to the world the crime, the horror, the ineffaceable guilt of destroying our fellow-man. The Hangman kills to prove the iniquity of killing. "But, Scripture, sir," says the Hangman, "Scripture, sir, says he-what are the words ?-oh-' He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.'" Tarry a little, good yeoman of the halter. "And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. "Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid, and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth, and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance And the Lord set a mark upon Cain lest any "And the Lord said unto him, shall be taken on him, seven-fold. finding him should kill him." Still the Hangman would hang upon the warranty of Scripture; supported in his faith by those christian philosophers, who, to make secure a darling prejudice, are ever more prone to take their arguments from Leviticus than from Saint Matthew. They can unsuspectingly be Jews for the nonce, when they would take "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth;" and in proportion to their readiness to exact severe retribution on the good Mosaic principle, is their wonder and their marvel, when, forced to go one mile out of their way, they are expected to go willingly "twain." The Hangman and his supporters make the Scriptures strange skipping-ground. Let us, however, consider the Hangman at his employment. He has proceeded in his task; yes, he has prepared the wretch for death, and gone below to draw the bolt. What are the Hangman's services to the people? What is preached to them by the miserable * No fiction. thing, pinioned, and haltered, and in an another instant to bewhat? Who shall say? The statesman, the Hangman's employer, in the mercifulness of his creed pays for Christian comfort to be administered to the felon, by a Christian priest. All praise to the statesman that it is so ! Well? How labours the clergyman? What are the goodly fruits of his eloquent exhortations? If the felon have made himself sufficiently notorious to be an object of great public curiosity, we are from time to time assured in a tone of congratulation, that the unfortunate man becomes every day more impressed with the truths of divine mercies and divine revelation. Thus gloriously instructed, the murderer is led forth to death. The gallows, it has been preached to him, is made the threshold of heaven; in a thought, and he will be with the angels; for the statesman Hence, standing between the beam and the pit, the felon stands, not as a wretch to be loathed, execrated; but as one of the chosen : "Wings at his shoulders seem to play!" The drop falls the sacredness of human life is illustrated upon the crowd by the death-struggles of the hanged: the hour passes: night comes: and flung into a prison-hole, quick-lime eats up the bones of the assassin. And this is the Hangman's great moral example: this the punishment! Death would, indeed, be punishment, could it only be administered by the executioner; but as God has made it the draught for all men; the inevitable cup to be drained to the dregs by all who live; since there is not one man privileged to pass it; is not that a strange punishment for the deepest wickedness of guilt, if the same evil must at the last foreclose the life of the nobly good? "But," says the Hangman, "your virtuous man dies with friends weeping about him; his death may, indeed, be most gracious; whilst the men who come into my hands Both are flung into the same eternity; and-hark!--what sound is that approaching the steps of the gallows. Hark! yes-the felon is pinioned; the procession is formed; and the hopeful and inspiring voice of the prison chaplain says:: "I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE, SAITH THE LORD; HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE." THE EXCISEMAN. BY GODFREY GRAFTON, GENT. It has been shrewdly observed by the ill-fated Colton-that melancholy victim to the darkest infatuation!-that there is one passage of the sacred Scriptures, upon which the potentates on earth, of every age, creed, and nation, have concurred and acted. It runs thus:"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed." : Now these taxes, chronicled by history as being nearly coeval with the existence of social communities, in a state of society highly complicated and refined, have given birth to the Exciseman, a personage undoubtedly very little known, and very much misunderstood. -- [Here the conviction very forcibly strikes us, that the aim of this work is at a higher and more laudable object than that of affording a merely faithful portraiture of the various "castes," whose peculiar excellences or defects invite the pencil to delineate, and the pen to record and describe them. Be it ours, then, to act upon this impression; and by purifying" the visual ray" through which the Exciseman is beheld, to place him in a proper light before the public; laying bare the morbid spots in his constitution, and shewing not only what he has been, is, and ought to be, but also the important relation which he bears to the commonweal.] The occupations of the assessor and collector of taxes have hitherto borne a share of public opprobrium, rather general than just; but upon the excise (from the widely-extending and sweeping nature of its grasp) the onus of contumely has most severely fallen. And it must be confessed that such offices are of a thankless description; and that, in surveying brewhouses, inspecting chandlers' coppers, or determining by the gauge the contents of a soap or malt frame, there is little to enlist, in favour of the Exciseman, the public respect and esteem; or that, by elevating and enlarging his ideas and understanding, might qualify him to be an acceptable as well as useful member of society. a |