hangman!--For, hear it, ye sanguinary _manes_ of our ancestors:--"_Les
bourreaux s'en vont!_" Executioners are departing! We shall shortly have
to commemorate in our obituaries, and signalize by the hands of our
novelists--"the last of the Jack Ketches." In these days of
ultra-philanthropy, the hangman scarcely finds salt to his porridge, or
porridge to salt.

_Exempli gratia_. In the course of last year, a patient of the lower class
was admitted into the lunatic ward of the public hospital at Marseilles,
whose malady seemed the result of religious depression. In that
supposition, the usual means of relief were resorted to, and he was at
length discharged as convalescent; when, to attest the perfectness of his
cure, he went and hanged himself! A _procès verbal_ was, as usual, made
out, and the supposed fanatic proved to be the ex-executioner of Lyons!
Tender-hearted people instantly ascribed his melancholy to qualms of
conscience. But it appeared in evidence, that, since the accession of the
citizen king, the trade of the hangman had become a dead failure; and the
disconsolate bankrupt was accordingly forced to take French leave of a
world wherein _bourreaux_ can no longer turn an honest penny!

Yet, less than three centuries ago, his predecessors were men of mark and
consideration. Our own King Hal took more heed of his executioner than of
half the counties over whose necks his axe was suspended; while Louis XI.,
a _legitimate_ sovereign of France, used to dip in the dish with Tristan
Hermite and Olivier le Dain. A few reigns later, and the hangman of the
French metropolis (who shares with its diocesan the honour of being styled
"Monsieur de Paris") was respected as the most accomplished in Europe. The
treasons of its civil wars had created so many executions, that a Gascon,
wishing to prove that his father had been beheaded as a nobleman, instead
of hanged like a dog or a citizen, asserted the decollation to have been