Another boy was hanged in Bow Street; other
young lads in various quarters of the town. Four wretched women, too,
were put to death. In a word, those who suffered as rioters were, for
the most part, the weakest, meanest, and most miserable among them. It
was a most exquisite satire upon the false religious cry which had led
to so much misery, that some of these people owned themselves to be
Catholics, and begged to be attended by their own priests.
One young man was hanged in Bishopsgate Street, whose aged grey-headed
father waited for him at the gallows, kissed him at its foot when he
arrived, and sat there, on the ground, till they took him down. They
would have given him the body of his child; but he had no hearse, no
coffin, nothing to remove it in, being too poor--and walked meekly away
beside the cart that took it back to prison, trying, as he went, to
touch its lifeless hand.
But the crowd had forgotten these matters, or cared little about them
if they lived in their memory: and while one great multitude fought
and hustled to get near the gibbet before Newgate, for a parting look,
another followed in the train of poor lost Barnaby, to swell the throng
that waited for him on the spot.
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