The Sun. — 1861-03-26 (London, England)

THE HILLS OF LONDON.  (Fenn? the St. Jaines's Magazine.) There was a time when great persons rode from the neighbourhood of the Tower, westward, up and down hill ; but it made all the difference in life to them, whether on reaching a certain point they proceeded by Snow and Holborn-hills, or by that of Ludgate. The latter sometimes led to the block in Lincoln's-inn-fields or Westminster-yard; but it more frequently took the wayfarer to Westminster Palace and acceptable greetings, whereas by by the other hills, a man who was the chief object of interest in a procession from the Tower seldom went to any other exaltation but that to be had at Tyburn So went Lord Badlesmere, because his obstinate wife, in his absence, would not surrender his Kentish castle of Leeds to Queen Isabella. So went, subsequently, Queen Isabelia'syounger friend, Edmund Mortimer. So went bonny Lady Hungerford—that pretty and petulant Agnes, who in a fit of impatience poisoned her husband, Sir Edward, and swung for it, like the ugliest of felons. It would take a volume to tell the names only of all the villains whose passage down Snow and Holborn Hills was demonstration clear of their having achieved that " greatness" which Fielding has so happily illustrated. Look, through your fingers if you will, at the solemn spectacle Generally speaking, it had little of solemnity in it. The heroes of the day were often on good terms with the mob, and jokes were exchanged between the men who were going to be hanged and the men who &served to be. There they pass, from the Tower, or any one of the City prisons, to the triangular erection, on "Deadly Never-Green." There pass Southwell, the sweet versifier ; and Felton, the assassin of Buckingham ; five of the three-score-save-one who signed away the life of Charles I. ; and victim after victim of Tit us Oates ; and John Smith, the burglar of Queen Anne's time, the only unlucky individual who ever really came to life after being duly executed at Tyburn. And there, amid the greetings and clamour of a quarter of a million of people, passes, smilingly, that hideous young murderer, Jack Sheppard, whom the brightest talent cannot polish up into a hero. And there is the doubly hideous Jonathan 'Wild, uttering Amen 'as he picks the chaplain's pocket of a cork • screw—if the treacherous coward had enough of the energy of evil left to allow of his committing hi that last felonyy A nobleman follows nn, Lord Ferrers, rgrrily dressed in his wedding . ; then a noblemum 8 servant, who for small ering suffered tl%e same penalty that his betters" did for murder_ Lord Harrinot '„on s man rode over the London.. hills to Tyburn, in a frock of blue and gold, with a white cockade in his hat, as a continual assertion of his innocence. That reverend gentleman veho succeeds is the very pink of fashionable Tireachers, DrDodd. He had long lain hid in the house known as Goodenough House, at thu corner of Gunnersbury-road and Brentford-lane ; and for robbing the Reverend Doctor Bell, the old Princess Amelia's, chaplain, in front of that very house, that remarli.ably handsome young highwayman, with sixteen ribands at the knees of his breec hes, is going also to " the three-square stilt at IN yburaf," wh,7.ther Dodd followed him.