columns of the smugly Christian Press. He steals without risking his
skin or losing his respectability. The suburb, wherein he brings up
a blameless, flat-footed family, regards him as its most renowned
benefactor. He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and
oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes charities,
and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a second-rate
Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him, in the town-hall
of his adopted borough.

How much worse is he than the High-toby-cracks of old! They were as
brave as lions; he is a very louse for timidity. His conduct is meaner
than the conduct of the most ruffianly burglar that ever worked a
centre-bit. Of art he has not the remotest inkling: though his greed
is bounded by the Bank of England, he understands not the elegancies of
life; he cares not how he plumps his purse, so long as it be full; and
if he were capable of conceiving a grand effect, he would willingly
surrender it for a pocketed half-crown. This side the Channel, in brief,
romance and the picturesque are dead; and in France, the last refuge of
crime, there are already signs of decay. The Abbé Bruneau caught a whiff
of style and invention from the past. That other Abbé--Rosslot was his
name--shone forth a pure creator: he owed his prowess to the example of
none. But in Paris crime is too often passionel, and a crime passionel
is a crime with a purpose, which, like the novel with a purpose, is
conceived by a dullard, and carried out for the gratification of the
middle-class.

To whitewash the scoundrel is to put upon him the heaviest dishonour: a
dishonour comparable only to the monstrously illogical treatment of
the condemned. When once a hero has forfeited his right to comfort and
freedom, when he is deemed no longer fit to live upon earth, the Prison