ond of goodness, is
both agreeable and medicinal; but if you are a bad man it is hateful,
and you cry out with Mr. Love-lust in Bunyan's Vanity Fair: 'Away with
him. I cannot endure him; he is for ever condemning my way.'

Not many of Dean Burgon's biographies reached this standard. The
explanation, perhaps, is that the Dean chiefly moved in clerical
circles where excellence is more frequently to be met with than
goodness.

In the same way a really bad man is one who has frankly said, 'Evil,
be thou my good.' Like the good man, though for a very different
reason, the bad one has ceased to make war with the devil. Finding a
conspiracy against goodness going on, the bad man joins it, and thus,
like the good man, is at peace with himself. The bad man is bent upon
his own way, to get what he wants, no matter at what cost. Human
lives! What do they matter? A woman's honour! What does that matter?
Truth and fidelity! What are they? To know what you want, and not to
mind what you pay for it, is the straight path to fame, fortune, and
hell-fire. Careers, of course, vary; to dominate a continent or to
open a corner shop as a pork-butcher's, plenty of devilry may go to
either ambition. Also, genius is a rare gift. It by no means follows
that because you are a bad man you will become a great one; but to be
bad, and at the same time unsuccessful, is a hard fate. It casts a
little doubt upon a man's badness if he does not, at least, make a
little money. It is a poor business accompanying badness on to a
common scaffold, or to see it die in a wretched garret. That was one
of my complaints with Mr. Seccombe's Twelve Bad Men. Most of them came
to violent ends. They were all failures.

But I have kept these twelve ladies waiting a most unconscionable
time. Who are they? There are amongst them four courtesans: Alice
Perrers, one of King Edward III.'s misses; Barbara Villiers, one of
King Charles II.'s; Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, who had to be content with
a royal Duke; and Mrs. Con Phillips. Six members of the criminal
class: Alice Arden, Moll Cutpurse, Jenny Diver, Elizabeth Brownrigg,
Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Bateman; and only two ladies of title,
Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess
of Kingston. Of these twelve bad women one-third were executed, Alice
Arden being burnt at Canterbury, Jenny Diver and Elizabeth Brownrigg
being hung at Tyburn, and Mary Bateman suffering the same fate at
Leeds. Elizabe