The terrible Thurtell was present, lord of the concourse; for wherever he moved he was master, and whenever he spoke, even when in chains, every other voice was silent.

He stood on the mead, grim and pale as usual, with his bruisers around.

He it was, indeed, who _got up_ the fight, as he had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst rural scenes, and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.
Rarely in our criminal jurisprudence has a murder trial excited more interest than that of John Thurtell for the murder of Weare--the Gill's Hill Murder, as it was called.

Certainly no murder of modern times has had so many indirect literary associations.

Borrow, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Walter Scott, and Thackeray are among those who have given it lasting fame by comment of one kind or another; and the lines ascribed to Theodore Hook are perhaps as well known as any other memory of the tragedy: They cut his throat from ear to ear, His brain they battered in, His name was Mr.William Weare, He dwelt in Lyon's Inn.
Carlyle's division of human beings of the upper classes into 'noblemen, gentlemen, and gigmen,' which occurs in his essay on Richter, and a later reference to gig-manhood which occurs in his essay on Goethe's Works, had their inspiration in an episode in the trial of Thurtell, when the question being asked, 'What sort of a person was Mr.Weare ?' brought the answer, 'He was always a respectable person.' 'What do you mean by respectable ?' the witness was asked.