uncommon in modern authors, learn to call lewdness gallantry, and the
effects of unbridled lust the starts of too warm an imagination. These
are notions which serve to cheat the mind and represent as the road of
pleasure that which is indeed the highway to the gallows. This, I
conceived, was the use proper to be made of the lives, or rather the
deaths of malefactors, and if I have done no other good in writing them,
I shall have at least this satisfaction, that I have preserved them from
being presented to the world in such a dress as might render the_
Academy of Thieving _their proper title, a thing once practised before,
and if one may guess from the general practice of mankind, might
probably have been attempted again, with success. How a different method
will fare in the world, time only can determine, and to that I leave it.
Yet considering the method in which I treat this subject, I readily
forsaw one objection which occasioned my writing so long a preface as
this, in order that it might be fully obviated._

_Though in the body of the work itself I have carefully traced the rise
of those corrupt inclinations which bring men to the committing of facts
within the cognizance of the Law, it still remains necessary that my
readers also become acquainted, at least in general, with what those
facts are which are so severely punished. In doing this I shall not
speak of matters in the style of a lawyer, but preserve the same
plainness of language which, as I thought it the most proper, I have
endeavoured throughout the whole piece._

_The order of things requires that I should first of all take notice how
the Law comes to have a right of punishing those who live under it with
Death or other grievous penalties, and this in a few words arises thus.
We enter into society for the sake of protection, and as this renders
certain laws necessary, we are justly concluded by them in other cases