a terror to the town, that when, a foppish young
fellow, who had had some sort of encounter
with him in a coffee-house, learnt from the
waiter who the stranger was, he speedily
subsided from his vapouring into a tone of extreme
terror, and stole out of the place, leaving the
wine he had ordered, untasted. It was after the
encounter at the Circus, that James and Horace
Smith, who had seen the provocation his lordship
had really received, called on him to say
that they were ready to testify to that fact in
any legal proceedings that might be taken.
They found the mantelpiece adorned witli
bludgeons, horsewhips, and other weapons of
offence; and the noble lord, who received them
with great cordiality, expressed his gratitude in
a very characteristic manner. " All I can say
in return is this," he exclaimed. " If ever I see
you engaged in a row, upon my soul I'll stand
by you." Not very long afterwards, his violent
career came to a violent close. He got into a
quarrel with one Captain Best, about a woman
of notoriously bad character, and a meeting
was arranged to take place the following
morning in the fields behind Holland House.
Best, who was his old friend, frequently
endeavoured to come to an amicable understanding
with him; but the other pertinaciously
refused. The encounter resulted in Lord Camelford
being mortally wounded. He was carried
to Little Holland House, not far off, and there,
after three days' suffering, he expired. With
all his ruffianism, there must have been
something generous in his nature, for, after he had
fallen, he took the captain by the hand, and
said, " Best, I am a dead man; you have killed
me, but I freely forgive you;" and he reproved
some labourers who ran to the spot, for
endeavouring to stop his adversary, saying that he
himself was the aggressor. Best had the
reputation of being the first shot in England; and,
though Lord Camelford knew himself to be in
the wrong, he had refused to retract, fearing the
imputation of cowardice. The scruple was mere
vanity; but it serves to illustrate the half-insane
character of the man. This was in 1804. Little
Holland House still lurks coyly behind its
muffling trees up a green lane at the side of
Holland Park; but the fields at the back of the
older mansion have long been built over.

Mr. Timbs relates a singular story of recovery
from death. A youth of seventeen was found
guilty in 1740 of a criminal assault, and was
hanged at Tyburn. After remaining suspended
for two-and-twenty minutes, he was cut down,
and taken to Surgeons' Hall, that the body
might be dissected. On being laid on the table,
however, he was heard to groan; he was thereupon
bled, and after a while was able to rear
himself up, though at first he could not speak
articulately. The sheriffs were then communicated
with; but, the news having spread abroad,
so great a mob collected about the Hall that the
sheriffs were afraid to take the wretched creature
back to Tyburn, and again hang him, as, with
the customary hardness of those times, they
seemed well disposed to do. They accordingly
kept him at the Hall till midnight, when, all
being quiet, he was recommitted to Newgate.
Two days afterwards he was reported to be
"fully recovered in health and senses;" but all
recollection of his execution, or even of his
trial, had gone—a fact partly accounted for by
his having been in a state of fever and delirium
ever since his original commitment to prison.
To this fact also, was attributed his extraordinary
escape from death. Being unconscious at the
time of his execution, and therefore having no
fear, his blood, it is thought, circulated with
greater quickness and force than it would otherwise
have done, and thus saved him from suffocation.
It appears that the lad was ultimately
transported for life. There are several stories
extant of recovery from seeming death—
sometimes under the very knife of the anatomist.
One of the strangest is that of a man in Ireland
who was hanged for sheep-stealing, and who
"came to life again" in the hands of a medical
operator. The latter had the good feeling not
to give information to the authorities, and the
malefactor, by a strange application of logic,
used afterwards to force the doctor to support
him, saying he was bound to continue that life
which he had restored, and threatening that, if
lie did not, he, the culprit, would give the
authorities information of his own escape from
death, and of the medical man's complicity in
that evasion of the law. The friends of Dr.
Dodd, the clerical forger, hoped to be equally
successful with him. The body was conveyed
to the house of an undertaker in Goodge-street,
Tottenham-court-road, where no less a man than
John Hunter was waiting to see what could be
done; but the criminal had been almost in a
state of collapse when he mounted the scaffold,
and what little life there was then in him could
not resist the stricture of the rope. At the
undertaker's, he was placed in a hot-bath, and
every exertion was made to save him, but in vain.
A great deal of time had been lost, through the
pressure of the crowd, but it would probably
have been a hopeless attempt in any case.

A good many supernatural stories are told in
these volumes. St. Paul's Cathedral is
associated with a strange delusion, of which an
account is given by Dr. Arnould, of Camberwell,
who had charge of the gentleman suffering from
it. He stated that one afternoon, while looking
in at a print-shop window in St. Paul's Churchyard,
he was addressed by an elderly gentleman,
who, after chatting about Sir Christopher Wren,
proposed that they should dine together, and then
ascend the cathedral; that he consented, and
that, having entered the ball just below the cross,
and being quite alone, the elderly gentleman
pulled out of his pocket something like a
compass, with curious figures round the edges, and
placed it in the centre of the ball. His
companion then felt a great trembling and horror
come over him, which was increased by the
mysterious person asking if he would like to see
any relative? He said he would like to see his
father, and a vision of his parent was at once
presented him in a mirror. Overcome with