and annoyed at finding himself in such low company. "Stand off, yourself!" was the indignant answer of the young sweep. "I have as good a right to be here as you have."
"Nothing," says Voltaire, "is so disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged," and the loneliness which in this moral age encompasses the felon's last hours should be as salutary as it is depressing. Mr. Housman, who gets closer to the plain thoughts of plain men than any poet of modern times, has given stern expression to the awful aloofness of the condemned criminal from his fellow creatures, an aloofness unknown in the cheerful, brutal days of old.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men who die at morn.
The sociability of Tyburn, if somewhat vehement in character, was a jocund thing by the side of such solitude as this.
Parish registers make curious reading. They tell so much in words so scant and bald that they set us wondering on our own ac-
