Show over by one."-- In this sportive strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so serious, which yet he would hardly have done if he had not known that there existed a predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen to consider the subject as a jest.

But what shall we say to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention the solution which the _Gravedigger_ in _Hamlet_ gives of his fellow-workman's problem,) in that scene in _Measure for Measure_, where the _Clown_ calls upon _Master Barnardine_ to get up and be hanged, which he declines on the score of being sleepy, has actually gone out of his way to gratify this amiable propensity in his countrymen; for it is plain, from the use that was to be made of his head, and from _Abhorson's_ asking, "Is the axe upon the block, sirrah ?" that beheading, and not hanging, was the punishment to which _Barnardine_ was destined.

But Shakspeare knew that the axe and block were pregnant with no ludicrous images, and therefore falsified the historic truth of his own drama (if I may so speak), rather than he would leave out such excellent matter for a jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in mid-air has been ever esteemed to be by Englishmen.
One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself into our contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to be, the absurd posture into which a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the vulgar delight to express it, upon nothing.

To see him whisking and wavering in the air, "As the wind you know will wave a man;"[1] to behold the vacant carcass, from which the life is newly dislodged, shifting between earth and heaven, the sport of every gust; like a weathercock, serving to show from which point the wind blows; like a maukin, fit only to scare away birds; like a nest left to swing upon a bough when the bird is flown: these are uses to which we cannot without a mixture of spleen and contempt behold the human carcass reduced.

We string up dogs, foxes, bats, moles, weasels.