Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly.  I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli’s restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God’s servant from that day forward.  I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.—­I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,—­the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle,—­and why?  Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water,—­which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge.  Something intensely human, narrow, and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes.  A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer.  “The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother’s portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young.  You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth.  I never saw that, but it is in the books.  Here is one I never heard mentioned;—­if any of the “Note and Query” tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.  Where is this monument?  I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—­What is that?—­I said.—­That, —­answered the coachman,—­is the hangman’s pillar.  Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep.  He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home.  In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him.  Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue.  I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.