It was formerly the custom to sing a psalm at the gallows before a
criminal was "turned off." And there is a good story, in Zachary Gray's
notes to _Hudibras_, told of one of the chaplains of the famous
Montrose; how, being condemned in Scotland to die for attending his
master in some of his expeditions, and being upon the ladder and ordered
to select a psalm to be sung, expecting a reprieve, he named the 119th
Psalm, with which the officer attending the execution complied (the
Scottish Presbyterians were great psalm-singers in those days), and it
was well for him he did so, for they had sung it half through before the
reprieve came. Any other psalm would certainly have hanged him! Cotton,
in his _Virgil Travestie_, thus alludes to the custom of psalm-singing
at the foot of the gallows:
Ready, when Dido gave the word,
To be advanced into the halter,
Without the benefit on's Psalter.
* * * * *
Then 'cause she would, to part the sweeter,
A portion have of Hopkins' metre,
As people use at execution,
For the decorum of conclusion,
Being too sad to sing, she says.[157]
[157] _Scarronides; or, Virgil Travestie_, etc., by Charles
Cotton, Book iv. _Poetical Works_, 5th edition, London,
1765, pp. 122, 140.
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