unused to such a perpendicular position, are
said to have broken their necks. He never
laughed till the laughing was over with all the
rest of the audience; a joke took some time to
travel from his ear to his midrif and tickle it to
laughter. When he went to the pit of the
theatre, the gods of the one shilling gallery
cried out, 'Sit down, you Sir, in the two!' not
perceiving, short-sighted creatures as they are,
that he was many feet lower down than the
midmost heaven." Joking apart, the Long
Lawyer, a London solicitor, was really over
seven feet in height. There died at York, in
seventeen hundred and sixty-five, two persons
who were twins in birth and nearly twins in
height; for the brother was seven feet three
inches, and the sister seven feet two; and yet
these tall people were only seventeen years old.
About the same time, there died one Mr. Bamford,
a hatter in Shire-lane: he was famed far
and wide for overlooking all his neighbours by a
head and shoulders or so; but we have mislaid
his feet and inches. The Annual Register
requires us to believe that Ames M'Donald, who
died near Cork, about the middle of the last
century, was a hundred and seventeen years old,
and seven feet six inches in height, when he
died; but this is a poser, for giants rarely live
to be old men. That Edmund Malone was
seven feet six inches in height, we can more
readily believe, for he was a young fellow in
his prime. Dr. Musgrave, who noticed him in
the Philosophical Transactions, states that his
(middle?) finger was six inches and three-quarters
long, his span fourteen inches, his cubit
(the distance from the elbow to the finger-tips)
twenty-six inches, and his arm thirty-eight inches
long. Some of the writers of the last century
tell of a Swede, Daniel Cajanus, who was seven
feet eight inches in height. Of the same stature
was Cornelius M'Grath, concerning whom a
strange story was told by Watkinson, in his
Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland.
Speaking of the celebrated Dr. Berkeley, Bishop
of Cloyne, Watkinson says: "The bishop had
a strange fancy to know whether it was not in
the power of art to increase the human stature.
An unhappy orphan appeared to him a fit
subject for trial. He made his essay according to
his preconceived theory, whatever it might be;
and the consequence was, that he (the orphan
M'Grath) became seven feet high in his sixteenth
year." But another and a more probable story
is, that M'Grath was of ordinary stature till
fifteen years of age; that he then shot up with
amazing rapidity; that the good bishop kindly
took him into his house while suffering from
"growing pains;" that M'Grath then commenced
a career of exhibiting as a giant; and
that he died in England towards the close of the
reign of George the Second. His full height
was seven feet eight; and his hand, we are told,
was "as large as a shoulder of mutton."
Fortunately for the truth of this last statement,
shoulders of mutton are not all of the same weight.
In the year seventeen hundred and eighty, there
was an "Irish youth" exhibiting at Charing-
cross, seven feet ten inches in height. Gaspard
Bauhin speaks of a Swiss who was eight feet
high; and Vander Linden of a Frisian of the
same height. A skeleton eight feet long was
dug up, in a Roman camp near St. Albans, in
the last century; and Cheseldon, the celebrated
anatomist, estimated that the living man must
have been eight feet four inches hi height. A
giant, eight feet high, was exhibited at Rouen
in seventeen hundred and thirty-five. Just
before the close of the last century, Mr. Jenkins,
a bank clerk, died; he was, by permission of the
directors, buried in the ground within the
building (not Soane's structure), formerly the
churchyard of St. Christopher. This was done
because he had a horror of being dissected, and
because it was known that surgeons were trying
quietly—not to catch him alive, but to catch
him dead. There is some doubt about his
height, but his outer coffin was eight feet long.

As for "O'Brien, the Irish giant," there is
no identifying him with exactness. He was
multiple. There was one of that name in the
last century, who made so much noise, and
gained so much money, that other giants
afterwards took the name of O'Brien, and dubbed
themselves Irish, as a good speculation. This
is believed to be the true explanation of the
fact that there have been Irish Giant O'Briens
seven feet ten, eight feet two, eight feet four,
and eight feet seven inches high. The skeletons
of two of these mighty men are preserved in the
Hunterian Museum, and that of a third in the
Dublin Museum, while the remains of a fourth
are interred in a Roman Catholic burial-ground
at Bristol. One of the profitable O'Briens,
whose real name was Patrick Cotter, "at Bath,
on a cold night, terrified a watchman by quietly
reaching up to a street lamp, and taking off the
cover to light his pipe." He made a fortune
by exhibiting himself, and had a carriage so
constructed as to accommodate his very elongated
person. One of this voluntary group of O'Briens,
we do not know which, was exhibited in the
Haymarket, and was announced in the handbill
as "A lineal descendant of the old puissant
King Brien Boreau, and has in person and
appearance all the similitude of that great and
grand potentate," of whom, of course, we ought
to have cartes-de-visite somewhere or other.
Moreover, "it is remarkable of this family that,
however various the revolutions in fortune and
alliance, the lineal descendants thereof have
been favoured by Providence with the original
size and stature which have been so peculiar to
that family." Happy O'Briens! The Charles
Byrne, "Irish Giant,'" who boasted of his eight
feet three inches about eighty years ago, was
possibly one of the O'Brien group, with the
name slightly altered; he died through drinking,
and had, like many persons of abnormal growth,
a great horror of being dissected after death.
A Swedish guardsman, in the service of Frederick
the First of Prussia, was eight feet six inches
high; which was also the height of a man
noticed by Diemerbrœck, and the length of the
skeleton of a woman described by Uffenbach.