Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.

To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon,
and thought he would improve the occasion by pointing out that, after
all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: 'Sir, you City men enter on
your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your
speculations succeed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours
happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between my
visitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have
succeeded to the last. I have been determined through life to hold the
position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is
the custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take
his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom!' When a friend
reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his
shoulders and said, 'Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles.'--_Pen, Pencil and Poison_.




WAINEWRIGHT AT HOBART TOWN


His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started
a studio, and returned to sketching and portrait-painting, and his
conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor did he
give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in
which he tried to make away with people who had offended him. But his
hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were complete