theft upon the historian of thieves. But he was too vain and too pompous
to smile at his own weakness, and thus he would pretend himself a
venturesome highwayman, a brave writer, and a profound scholar. Indeed,
so far did his pride carry him, that he would have the world believe
him the same Charles Johnson, who wrote The Gentleman Cully and The
Successful Pyrate. Thus with a boastful chuckle he would quote:

Johnson, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning,
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning

Thus, ignoring the insult, he would plume himself after his drunken
fashion that he, too, was an enemy of Pope.

Yet Johnson has remained an example. For the literature of scoundrelism
is as persistent in its form as in its folk-lore. As Harman's Caveat,
which first saw the light in 1566, serves as a model to an unbroken
series of such books, as The London Spy, so from Johnson in due course
were developed the Newgate Calendar, and those innumerable records,
which the latter half of the Eighteenth Century furnished us forth.
The celebrated Calendar was in its origin nothing more than a list
of prisoners printed in a folio slip. But thereafter it became the
Malefactor's Bloody Register, which we know. Its plan and purpose were
to improve the occasion. The thief is no longer esteemed for an artist
or appraised upon his merits: he is the awful warning, which shall
lead the sinner to repentance. 'Here,' says the preface, 'the giddy
thoughtless youth may see as in a mirror the fatal consequences of
deviating from virtue'; here he may tremble at the discovery that 'often
the best talents are prostituted to the basest purposes.' But in spite
of 'the proper reflections of the whole affair,' the famous Calendar
deserved the praise of Borrow. There is a directness in the narration,