I will assume, my benevolent friend and present reader, that you yourself are virtuous, not from a fear of punishment, but from a sheer love of good: but us you and I walk through life, consider what hundreds of thousands of rascals we must have met, who have not been found out at all.In high places and low, in Clubs and on 'Change, at church or the balls and routs of the nobility and gentry, how dreadful it is for benevolent beings like you and me to have to think these undiscovered though not unsuspected scoundrels are swarming! What is the difference between you and a galley-slave? Is yonder poor wretch at the hulks not a man and a brother too? Have you ever forged, my dear sir? Have you ever cheated your neighbor? Have you ever ridden to Hounslow Heath and robbed the mail? Have you ever entered a first-class railway carriage, where an old gentleman sat alone in a sweet sleep, daintily murdered him, taken his pocket-book, and got out at the next station? You know that this circumstance occurred in France a few months since.If we have travelled in France this autumn we may have met the ingenious gentleman who perpetrated this daring and successful coup.We may have found him a well-informed and agreeable man.I have been acquainted with two or three gentlemen who have been discovered after--after the performance of illegal actions.What? That agreeable rattling fellow we met was the celebrated Mr.John Sheppard? Was that amiable quiet gentleman in spectacles the well-known Mr.Fauntleroy? In Hazlitt's admirable paper, "Going to a Fight," he describes a dashing sporting fellow who was in the coach, and who was no less a man than the eminent destroyer of Mr.William Weare.Don't tell me that you would not like to have met (out of business) Captain Sheppard, the Reverend Doctor Dodd, or others rendered famous by their actions and misfortunes, by their lives and their deaths.They are the subjects of ballads, the heroes of romance.A friend of mine had the house in May Fair, out of which poor Doctor Dodd was taken handcuffed.There was the paved hall over which he stepped.That little room at the side was, no doubt, the study where he composed his elegant sermons.Two years since Ihad the good fortune to partake of some admirable dinners in Tyburnia--magnificent dinners indeed; but rendered doubly interesting from the fact that the house was that occupied by the late Mr.Sadleir.One night the late Mr.Sadleir took tea in that dining-room, and, to the surprise of his butler, went out, having put into his pocket his own cream-jug.The next morning, you know, he was found dead on Hampstead Heath, with the cream-jug lying by him, into which he had poured the poison by which he died.The idea of the ghost of the late gentleman flitting about the room gave a strange interest to the banquet.Can you fancy him taking his tea alone in the dining-room? He empties that cream-jug and puts it in his pocket; and then he opens yonder door, through which he is never to pass again.Now he crosses the hall: and hark! the hall-door shuts upon him, and his steps die away.They are gone into the night.They traverse the sleeping city.They lead him into the fields, where the gray morning is beginning to glimmer.He pours something from a bottle into a little silver jug.It touches his lips, the lying lips.Do they quiver a prayer ere that awful draught is swallowed? When the sun rises they are dumb.
I neither knew this unhappy man, nor his countryman--Laertes let us call him--who is at present in exile, having been compelled to fly from remorseless creditors.Laertes fled to America, where he earned his bread by his pen.I own to having a kindly feeling towards this scapegrace, because, though an exile, he did not abuse the country whence he fled.I have heard that he went away taking no spoil with him, penniless almost; and on his voyage he made acquaintance with a certain Jew; and when he fell sick, at New York, this Jew befriended him, and gave him help and money out of his own store, which was but small.Now, after they had been awhile in the strange city, it happened that the poor Jew spent all his little money, and he too fell ill, and was in great penury.And now it was Laertes who befriended that Ebrew Jew.He fee'd doctors; he fed and tended the sick and hungry.Go to, Laertes! I know thee not.It may be thou art justly exul patriae.But the Jew shall intercede for thee, thou not, let us trust, hopeless Christian sinner.
Another exile to the same shore I knew: who did not? Julius Caesar hardly owed more money than Cucedicus: and, gracious powers!