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His successor, Marwood, advocates and makes use of the “long drop,” and many have affirmed that his mode for putting criminals to death is the most merciful of the two; but when doctors (I mean hangmen) differ, who shall decide?

Calcraft has now retired. He is seventy-nine years of age, and was, when I last saw him, in tolerably good-health for a man of his years.

The name of the gibbet’s victims have been legion; for until a very recent period our penal code was most severe. We have hanged not only the murderer, the ravisher, and the incendiary—​not only the burglar, the highwayman, and the forger, but the sheep-stealer, the petty thief who purloined a roll of cloth or a loaf of bread from a shop-counter. If any nation ought to know how to hang, it should assuredly be the English.

Decapitation has been a mode of death reserved for aristocratic culprits, although in the “Halifax gibbet” and the Scottish “Maiden” some faint resemblance to the guillotine may be traced. But we have always obstinately refused to employ the machine, adapted from the mediæval types by the benevolent French physician, and have stuck manfully to the gallows.