Page:Compromises (Repplier).djvu/231

 Rh of the English people was to see men hanged, and the leading features of the entertainment were modified from time to time to please a popular taste. Dr. Johnson, the sanest as well as the best man of his day, highly commended these public executions as "satisfactory to all parties. The public is gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it." That the enjoyment was often mutual, it is impossible to deny. There was a world of meaning in the gentle custom, supported for years by a very ancient benefaction, of giving a nosegay to the condemned man on his way to Tyburn. Before the cart climbed Holborn Hill,—"the heavy hill" as it was called, with a touch of poetry rivalling the "Bridge of Sighs,"—it stopped at Saint Sepulchre's church, and on the church steps stood one bearing in his hands the flowers that were to yield their fresh fragrance to the dying. Nor were the candidates without their modest pride. When the noted chimney-sweep, Sam Hall, achieved the honour of a hanging, he was rudely jostled, and bidden to stand off by a highwayman, stepping haughtily into the cart,