at the Hulks, sought for a
second time the genial airs of Botany Bay.

His vanity and his laziness were alike invincible. He believed himself
a miracle of learning as well as a perfect thief, and physical toil
was the sole 'lay' for which he professed no capacity. For a while
he corrected the press for a printer, and he roundly asserts that his
knowledge of literature and of foreign tongues rendered him invaluable.
It was vanity again that induced him to assert his innocence when he
was lagged for so vulgar a crime as stealing a wipe from a tradesman
in Chancery Lane. At the moment of arrest he was on his way to purchase
base coin from a Whitechapel bit-faker: but, despite his nefarious
errand, he is righteously wrathful at what he asserts was an unjust
conviction, and henceforth he assumed the crown of martyrdom. His first
and last ambition during the intervals of freedom was gentility, and so
long as he was not at work he lived the life of a respectable grocer.
Although the casual Cyprian flits across his page, he pursued the one
flame of his life for the good motive, and he affects to be a very model
of domesticity. The sentiment of piety also was strong upon him, and if
he did not, like the illustrious Peace, pray for his jailer, he rivalled
the Prison Ordinary in comforting the condemned. Had it only been his
fate to die on the gallows, how unctuous had been his croak!

The text of his 'Memoirs' having been edited, it is scarce possible
to define his literary talent. The book, as it stands, is an excellent
piece of narrative, but it loses somewhat by the pretence of style. The
man's invulnerable conceit prevented an absolute frankness, and there is
little enough hilarity to correct the acid sentiment and the intolerable
vows of repentance. Again, though he knows his subject, and can patter
flash with the best, his incorrigible respectability leads him to ape
the manner of a Grub Street hack, and to banish to a vocabulary those
pearls of slang which might have added vigour and lustre to his somewhat
tiresome page. However, the thief cannot escape his inevitable defects.
The vanity, the weakness, the sentimentality of those who are born
beasts of prey, yet have the faculty of depredation only half-developed,
are the foes of truth, and it is well to remember that the autobiography
of a rascal is tainted at its source. A congenial pickpocket, equipped
with the self-knowledge and the candour which would enable him to