but were their lives or their writings immoral?

N.B.

_Sir Gammer Vans_.--Can any one give any account of a comic story about
one "_Sir Gammer Vans_," of whom, amongst other absurdities, it is said
"_that his aunt was a justice of peace, and his sister a captain of
horse_"? It is alluded to somewhere {90} in Swift's _Letters_ or
_Miscellanies_; and I was told by a person whose recollection, added to
my own, goes back near a hundred years, that it was supposed to be a
_political satire_, and may have been of Irish origin, as I think there
is some allusion to it in one of Goldsmith's plays or essays.

C.

* * * * *


REPLIES

PUNISHMENT OF DEATH BY BURNING.

Probably some of the readers of "NOTES AND QUERIES" will share in the
surprise expressed by E.S.S.W. (Vol. ii., p. 6.), yet many persons now
living must remember when spectacles such as he alludes to were by no
means uncommon. An examination of the newspapers and other periodicals
of the latter half of the eighteenth century would supply numerous
instances in which the punishment of strangling and burning was
inflicted; as well in cases of petit treason, for the murder of a
husband, as more frequently in cases of coining, which, as the law then