INTRODUCTION

There are other manifestations of greatness than to relieve suffering or
to wreck an empire. Julius Cæsar and John Howard are not the only heroes
who have smiled upon the world. In the supreme adaptation of means to an
end there is a constant nobility, for neither ambition nor virtue is
the essential of a perfect action. How shall you contemplate with
indifference the career of an artist whom genius or good guidance
has compelled to exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer
aptitudes? A masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the
reprobation of the moralist. The scoundrel, when once justice is quit
of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by their
effect; and he dies secure in the knowledge that he is commonly more
distinguished, if he be less loved, than his virtuous contemporaries.

While murder is wellnigh as old as life, property and the pocket
invented theft, late-born among the arts. It was not until avarice
had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of wealth, until
civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable property, that
thieving became a liberal and an elegant profession. True, in pastoral
society, the lawless man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the
barrier between robbery and warfare. But the contrast is as sharp
between the savagery of the ancient reiver and the polished performance
of Captain Hind as between the daub of the pavement and the perfection
of Velasquez.

So long as the Gothic spirit governed Europe, expressing itself in