ingularly spirited
brother apprentice of his, who not only drank, kept loose company, and
played all sorts of very mischievous practical jokes, but even
occasionally stole, out of warehouses; which was of course a very
dauntless thing, seeing that it brought him within wind of the gallows;
whereas another of our wild workmen--a man of sense and
intelligence--not unfrequently cut short the narratives of the weaker
brother, by characterizing his spirited apprentice as a mean, graceless
scamp, who, had he got his deservings, would have been hung like a dog.
I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school
education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much
heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated
their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against
intemperance or licentiousness; but it did form a not ineffectual
protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices--such as theft,
and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and
dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society:
there have been accomplished ladies of wealth and rank who have indulged
in a propensity for stealing out of drapers' shops; and gentlemen of
birth and education who could not be trusted in a library or a
bookseller's back-room; and what sometimes occurs in the higher walks
must be occasionally exemplified in the lower also; but, judging from
what I have seen, I must hold it as a general rule, that a good
intellectual education is a not inefficient protection against the
meaner felonies, though not in any degree against the "pleasant vices."
The only adequate protection against both, equally, is the sort of
education which my friend John Wilson the labourer exemplified--a kind
of education not often acquired in schools, and not much more frequently
possessed by schoolmasters than by any other class of professional men.

The most remarkable man in our party was a young fellow of
three-and-twenty--at least as much a blackguard as any of his
companions, but possessed of great strength of character and intellect,
and, with all his wildness, marked by very noble traits. He was a
strongly and not inelegantly formed man, of about six
feet--dark-complexioned, and of a sullen cast of countenance, which,
however, though he could, I doubt not, become quite as formidable as he
looked, concealed in his ordinary moods much placidity of temper, and a
r