and pinioned arms, under the beam, waiting
until the hangman is ready to attend to him—
the executioner being engaged at the moment in
pulling a white nightcap over the face of the
less important malefactor. Nothing can exceed
the brutality of this picture. The hangman is
adjusting the cap with the air of a sculptor
administering the final touches to a favourite
work, and the head and face indicated within
the cap are blank and shapeless as a pudding
ready for boiling.

In both of these illustrations there is strong
suggestion of a tendency, conscious or unconscious,
on the part of the designer to impart
something of the aspect of a hero, or a martyr,
to the figure of his principal performer. He is
smartly dressed, with neat boots and symmetrical
trousers. His hair is parted carefully in the
middle, and there is an indescribable air about
him of knowing that he is famous, and enjoying
the consciousness of fame.

There is no want of variety in these works of
art. In one respect, it is true, they are alike—-
they deal always in horrors. But the horrors
are various. Here is a huge design showing the
assassination of the Deputy-Lieutenant of Westmeath,
on the same page with a smaller cartoon
representing the ruinous results of a race
between a couple of costermongers' donkeys, and
a third in which one of the costermongers, who
has managed to kill a gentleman's horse with
the shaft of his barrow, is captured by a
particularly able-bodied woman, who holds him down
on the ground until the tardy policeman arrives
on the scene. A man holding a child by the
waistband, over the mouth of a well into which
he is about to drop it, is shown, on another of
the broadsheets, side by side with a most
horrible representation of a pauper, with a long
beard, chopping at his own throat with a huge
dinner-knife. The pauper is described in the
literary notice which accompanies the woodcut
as holding aside his beard while in the act of
cutting his throat; and the gusto with which
the artist has laid hold of this incident is very
marked.

So choice a bit of squalor as that furnished
by the discovery of the body of the escaped
lunatic at Hackney-wick is not forgotten by the
artist who has this weekly sheet of horrors to
supply. He makes a great effort to be terrible
in dealing with this subject. His figures are
larger than ever, in the design which illustrates
the descriptive notice. He treats the public to
some wonderful exhibition of expression in the
faces of the discoverers of the body, and is
altogether unsparing of printer's ink in developing
the dark recesses of his background and the
gloomy interior of the cupboard. Still, for
some reason or other, he does not succeed in
impressing us. Perhaps this is because in trying
to force the expression of his discovering
workman, he has insanely planted five exceedingly
jocose crow's-foot wrinkles at the corner
of his right eye —perhaps because his man in
the cupboard is not in the least dead; indeed
his attitude would be incompatible, not only
with death, but even, while the laws of gravitation
exist, with genuine sleep. It is curious
to observe how utterly devoid of even this
kind of power— as of all other power— are
these woodcuts, one and all. There is not
the slightest token of the commonest and most
widely diffused power of observing, on the
part of the artist. In the case just quoted, the
head of the dead man in the cupboard, is inclined
at an angle so slight that its sustainment in its
position necessarily implies the use of muscular
power. And just in the same way there is in
one of the marginal illustrations, on the same
page, a representation of an accident at sea, in
which two men are shown clinging to the keel of
a boat, with hair, which, instead of being matted
close to the head by the action of the water,
is dressed in barber's-block fashion, and
perfectly crisp and curly. In small things as well
as large, it seems to be only the great artist
who will take the trouble to think what he is
about.

But it is not in a critical examination of these
precious works of art that we are now engaged.
It is the moral rather than the technical result
achieved by the artist with which we have to
do. What is their effect on the group of men
and boys, who always congregate round a fresh
sheet as soon as it makes its appearance in the
shop-window of the small newsvender? This is
the really grave question. That audience of
men and boys is never wanting. They stand
in little knots gazing at the shocking
reproductions of shocking scenes, with every
manifestation of profound interest, if not of extreme
enjoyment. They seem to gloat over these horrors,
and always to enjoy the worst and most
violent atrocities the most keenly; and
especially is this so with the younger amateurs.
They will compare notes one with another on
the merits of the art treasures thus liberally
exhibited to them free of charge. They make an
excellent audience. No especially malignant
bludgeon stroke, no exceptionably wide-gaping
wound, no more than commonly generous
flow of the vital fluid— and the wounds gape
very wide, and the vital fluid flows very freely
in most of these pictures— is lost upon them.
On the contrary, all these delicate touches find
in this special public to which they appeal, a
keen and sympathising appreciation. Nor, to
judge by appearances, is the infliction of the
punishment awarded to crime, less attractive as
a subject for art illustration to these morbidly
disposed youngsters than the commission of the
crime itself. The prison scenes, and especially
those which represent the transactions which
immediately precede the last scene of all, are
invariably popular; while as to that really
last scene, with its prurient display of nooses,
and night-caps, and the other horrible para-
phernalia of the scaffold, it is always regarded
as a thing of beauty beyond the rest, and a joy—
if not for ever, at least for a considerable part
of the current week.

It is impossible for any thoughtful man to
come upon one of these little groups, and not