such an exhibition beneficial, it would not lament over a few thousand eager witnesses:  if the sermon be edifying, you cannot have too large a congregation; if you teach a moral lesson in a grand, impressive way, it is difficult to see how you can have too many pupils.  Of course, neither the justice nor the expediency of capital punishments falls to be discussed here.  This, however, may be said, that the popular feeling against them may not be so admirable a proof of enlightenment as many believe.  It is true that the spectacle is painful, horrible; but in pain and horror there is often hidden a certain salutariness, and the repulsion of which we are conscious is as likely to arise from debilitation of public nerve, as from a higher reach of public feeling.  To my own thinking, it is out of this pain and hatefulness that an execution becomes invested with an ideal grandeur.  It is sheer horror to all concerned—­sheriffs, halbertmen, chaplain, spectators, Jack Ketch, and culprit; but out of all this, and towering behind the vulgar and hideous accessories of the scaffold, gleams the majesty of implacable law.  When every other fine morning a dozen cut-purses were hanged at Tyburn, and when such sights did not run very strongly against the popular current, the spectacle was vulgar, and could be of use only to the possible cut-purses congregated around the foot of the scaffold.  Now, when the law has become so far merciful; when the punishment of death is reserved for the murderer; when he can be condemned only on the clearest evidence; when, as the days draw slowly on to doom, the frightful event impending over one stricken wretch throws its shadow over the heart of every man, woman, and child in the great city; and when the official persons whose duty it is to see the letter of the law carried out perform that duty at the expense of personal pain,—­a public execution is not vulgar, it becomes positively sublime.  It is dreadful, of course; but its dreadfulness melts into pure awfulness.  The attention is taken off the criminal, and is lost in a sense of the grandeur of justice; and the spectator who beholds an execution, solely as it appears to the eye, without recognition of the idea which towers behind it, must be a very unspiritual and unimaginative spectator indeed.

It is taken for granted that the spectators of public executions—­the artisans and country people who take up their stations overnight as close to the barriers as possible, and the wealthier classes who occupy hired windows and employ opera-glasses—­are merely drawn together by a morbid relish for horrible sights.  He is a bold man who will stand forward as the advocate of such persons—­so completely is the popular mind made up as to their tastes and motives.  It is not disputed that the large body of the mob, and of the occupants at windows, have been drawn together by an appetite for excitement; but it is quite possible that many come there from an impulse