The "First stage of Cruelty" shows Nero, when he is a child, hurting a dog. In the "Second stage of cruelty", Nero, who is an adult, beats his horse. Then in "Cruelty in perfection", he becomes a robber and murders his pregnant lover. At last, in "The reward of cruelty", his body is taken from the gallows after his execution and is cut up into pieces by surgeons. This last annotation refers directly to the act of parliament then under consideration and passed in 1752 which changed the law to require the bodies of executed murderers to be surrendered to the surgeons for use in anatomy classes and only buried after they had been anatomized. The act was created in response to the increase in murders, especially in the suburbs of London.