Exempli gratia.  In the course of last year, a patient of the lower class was admitted into the lunatic ward of the public hospital at Marseilles, whose malady seemed the result of religious depression.  In that supposition, the usual means of relief were resorted to, and he was at length discharged as convalescent; when, to attest the perfectness of his cure, he went and hanged himself!  A proces verbal was, as usual, made out, and the supposed fanatic proved to be the ex-executioner of Lyons!  Tender-hearted people instantly ascribed his melancholy to qualms of conscience.  But it appeared in evidence, that, since the accession of the citizen king, the trade of the hangman had become a dead failure; and the disconsolate bankrupt was accordingly forced to take French leave of a world wherein bourreaux can no longer turn an honest penny!

Yet, less than three centuries ago, his predecessors were men of mark and consideration.  Our own King Hal took more heed of his executioner than of half the counties over whose necks his axe was suspended; while Louis XI., a legitimate sovereign of France, used to dip in the dish with Tristan Hermite and Olivier le Dain.  A few reigns later, and the hangman of the French metropolis (who shares with its diocesan the honour of being styled “Monsieur de Paris”) was respected as the most accomplished in Europe.  The treasons of its civil wars had created so many executions, that a Gascon, wishing to prove that his father had been beheaded as a nobleman, instead of hanged like a dog or a citizen, asserted the decollation to have been so expertly executed en Greve, that the sufferer was unconscious of his end.  “Shake yourself,” exclaimed the executioner; and, on his lordship’s making the attempt, his head rolled into the dust.

This adroitness was the result of competition.  In that day there were degrees of hangmen, and promotion might be accomplished.  Not only had the king his executioner, and the Lorraines theirs—­the court and the city—­the abbot of St Germain des Pres—­the abbot of this, and the abbot of that—­but various communities and Signories, having right of life and death over their vassals, kept an executioner for purposes of domestic torture, as they kept a seneschal to carve their meats; or as people now keep a chef or a_ maitre d’hotel_.  In those excellent olden times of Europe, hangmen, doubtless, carried about written characters from lord to lord, certifying their experience with rope and axe—­branding-iron and thong.  So long as the Inquisition afforded constant work for able hands, a good hangman out of place must have been a treasure!  Had there been register-offices or newspaper advertisements, there probably would have appeared—­