152 Slang Dictionaries. [Aveusr, 
which are not to be met with in any other book ; the sacrifices of the 
finishers of the law, the abolition of the triumph or ovation of Holborn 
Hill, with the introduction of the present mode of execution at New- 
gate, chronologically ascertained ;—points of great importance to both 
the present and future compilers of the Tyburn Chronicle.” 
To this praise the work is deservedly entitled. In no language, we 
believe, does there exist so copious a collection of synonymes for the last 
finisher of the law. Nor, when we consider the vast number of offences 
which are visited with the penalty of death among us, can this be won- 
dered at. It is too common not to have become sometimes more an 
object of jest than of awe—particularly if we consider that many of the 
crimes so punished can never be looked upon by the populace at least as ° 
deserving of such an infliction. Nor is Grose confined solely to hanging 
—for his work abounds in allusions to every sort of punishment inflicted 
with or without law. We shall extract a dozen or so at random. 
What is an anabaptist, gentle reader? You will probably think of 
John of Leyden, and the gentlemen in Munster, in all their altitudes— 
or of a grave, argumentative, and long-faced disputant, in a Geneva 
cloak. Grose will set you on a different scent. His anabaptist is—“a 
pickpocket caught in the fact, and ducked in the next horse-pond.” 
Air and exercise may probably call up novel ideas in the sentimental 
mind, or, in the hypochondriac, may suggest the nature of the doctor and 
his ultimatum. Here the sense is rather different, and somewhat disa- 
greeable in practice ; for air and exercise, it seems, is but the softened 
manner of expressing “a whipping at the cart’s-tail.” Another article 
informs us, that a gentleman who enjoys this diversion is said to be 
“ fly-flapped.” 
« Babes in the wood,” we all know, are people in the stocks or the 
pillory ; but it is not perhaps as generally suspected that “ puzzling- 
sticks” are the triangles at which culprits are whipped, or that a “ spread- 
eagle” is a soldier tied up to undergo that operation. 
To “kiss the gunner’s daughter,” is certainly not an amatory feat 
comparable to the ceremony of embracing the maiden in former days ; 
but when we learn that it is being tied to a gun, and flogged upon the 
seat of honour, we must admit that the lady’s embrace is not delightful. 
An infliction on the same part, of a different kind, recurs in the name of 
« cobbing,” which is— 
«« A punishment used by the seamen for petty offences or irregularities among 
themselves: it consists in bastonading the offender on the sitting part with a 
cobbing stick, or pike staff; the number usually inflicted is a dozen. At the 
first stroke the executioner repeats the word watch, on which all persons pre- 
sent are to take off their hats, on pain of like punishment: the last stroke is 
always given as hard as possible, and is called the purse. Ashore, among 
soldiers, where this punishment is sometimes adopted, watch and the purse are 
not included in the number, but given over and above, or, in the vulgar phrase, 
free gratis for nothing. This piece of discipline is also inflicted in Ireland, 
by the school-boys, on persons coming into the school without taking off 
their hats ; it is there called school butter.” 
But, without dwelling on the minor punishments, hanging, as G 
premises, cuts a most prominent figure in his book. Its synonymes are 
endless. It is known by the name of “ riding the horse foaled by 
acorn ;’—— mounting the three-legged mare,” aterm that, we are care- 
fully told, is now inappropriate, since the invention of that eleganz — 
