altogether different.  Just consider the nature of the expected sight,—­a man in tolerable health probably, in possession of all his faculties, perfectly able to realise his position, conscious that for him this world and the next are so near that only a few seconds divide them—­such a man stands in the seeing of several thousand eyes.  He is so peculiarly circumstanced, so utterly lonely,—­hearing the tolling of his own death-bell, yet living, wearing the mourning clothes for his own funeral,—­that he holds the multitude together by a shuddering fascination.  The sight is a peculiar one, you must admit, and every peculiarity has its attractions.  Your volcano is more attractive than your ordinary mountain.  Then consider the unappeasable curiosity as to death which haunts every human being, and how pathetic that curiosity is, in so far as it suggests our own ignorance and helplessness, and we see at once that people may flock to public executions for other purposes than the gratification of morbid tastes:  that they would pluck if they could some little knowledge of what death is; that imaginatively they attempt to reach to it, to touch and handle it through an experience which is not their own.  It is some obscure desire of this kind, a movement of curiosity not altogether ignoble, but in some degree pathetic; some rude attempt of the imagination to wrest from the death of the criminal information as to the great secret in which each is profoundly interested, which draws around the scaffold people from the country harvest-fields, and from the streets and alleys of the town.  Nothing interests men so much as death.  Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale it.  “A greater crowd would come to see me hanged,” Cromwell is reported to have said when the populace came forth on a public occasion.  The Lord Protector was right in a sense of which, perhaps, at the moment he was not aware.  Death is greater than official position.  When a man has to die, he may safely dispense with stars and ribbands.  He is invested with a greater dignity than is held in the gift of kings.  A greater crowd would have gathered to see Cromwell hanged, but the compliment would have been paid to death rather than to Cromwell.  Never were the motions of Charles I. so scrutinised as when he stood for a few moments on the scaffold that winter morning at Whitehall.  King Louis was no great orator usually, but when on the 2d January, 1793, he attempted to speak a few words in the Place De la Revolution, it was found necessary to drown his voice in a harsh roll of soldiers’ drums.  Not without a meaning do people come forth to see men die.  We stand in the valley, they on the hill-top, and on their faces strikes the light of the other world, and from some sign or signal of theirs we attempt to discover or extract a hint of what it is all like.