The singularity of my case has often led me to inquire into the reasons of the general levity with which the subject of hanging is treated as a topic in this country.  I say, as a topic:  for let the very persons who speak so lightly of the thing at a distance be brought to view the real scene,—­let the platform be bona fide exhibited, and the trembling culprit brought forth,—­the case is changed; but as a topic of conversation, I appeal to the vulgar jokes which pass current in every street.  But why mention them, when the politest authors have agreed in making use of this subject as a source of the ridiculous?  Swift, and Pope, and Prior, are fond of recurring to it.  Gay has built an entire drama upon this single foundation.  The whole interest of the Beggar’s Opera may be said to hang upon it.  To such writers as Fielding and Smollett it is a perfect bonne-bouche.—­Hear the facetious Tom Brown, in his Comical View of London and Westminster, describe the Order of the Show at one of the Tyburn Executions in his time:—­“Mr. Ordinary visits his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight.  Doleful procession up Holborn Hill about eleven.  Men handsome and proper that were never thought so before, which is some comfort however.  Arrive at the fatal place by twelve.  Burnt brandy, women, and sabbath-breaking, repented of.  Some few penitential drops fall under the gallows.  Sheriffs’ men, parson, pickpockets, criminals, all very busy.  The last concluding peremptory psalm struck up.  Show over by one.”—­In this sportive strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so serious, which yet he would hardly have done if he had not known that there existed a predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen to consider the subject as a jest.  But what shall we say to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention the solution which the Gravedigger in Hamlet gives of his fellow-workman’s problem,) in that scene in Measure for Measure, where the Clown calls upon Master Barnardine to get up and be hanged, which he declines on the score of being sleepy, has actually gone out of his way to gratify this amiable propensity in his countrymen; for it is plain, from the use that was to be made of his head, and from Abhorson’s asking, “Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?” that beheading, and not hanging, was the punishment to which Barnardine was destined.  But Shakspeare knew that the axe and block were pregnant with no ludicrous images, and therefore falsified the historic truth of his own drama (if I may so speak), rather than he would leave out such excellent matter for a jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in mid-air has been ever esteemed to be by Englishmen.

One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself into our contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to be, the absurd posture into which a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the vulgar delight to express it, upon nothing.  To see him whisking and wavering in the air,