a Hindoo or a
Hottentot, a Pole, or a Piano-player, to interest their guests--was
lately brought up before Sir Peter Laurie, charged by 964 with
obtaining money under false pretences, and sentenced to three months'
imprisonment and hard labour at the treadmill.

The charge looks a grave one, good reader, and perhaps already some
notion is trotting through your head about forgery or embezzlement;
you think of widows rendered desolate, or orphans defrauded; you
lament over the hard-earned pittance of persevering industry lost to
its possessor; and, in your heart, you acknowledge that there may have
been some cause for the partition of Poland, and that the Emperor of
the Russias, like another monarch, may not be half so black as he is
painted. But spare your honest indignation; our unpronounceable friend
did none of these. No; the head and front of his offending was simply
exciting the sympathies of a feeling world for his own deep wrongs;
for the fate of his father, beheaded in the Grand Place at Warsaw; for
his four brothers, doomed never to see the sun in the dark mines of
Tobolsk; for his beautiful sister, reared in the lap of luxury and
wealth, wandering houseless and an outcast around the palaces of St.
Petersburg, wearying heaven itself with cries for mercy on her
banished brethren; and last of all, for himself--he, who at the battle
of Pultowa led heaven-knows how many and how terrific charges of
cavalry,--whose breast was a galaxy of orders only outnumbered by his
wounds--that he should be an exile, without friends, and without home!
In a word, by a beautiful and highly-wrought narrative, that drew
tears from the lady and ten shillings from the gentleman of the house,
he became amenable to our law as a swindler and an impostor, simply
because his narrative was a fiction.

In the name of all justice, in the name of truth, of honesty, and fair
dealing, I ask you, is this right? or, if the treadmill be the fit
reward for such powers as his, what shall we say, what shall we do,
with all the popular writers of the day? How many of Bulwer's stories
are facts? What truth is there in James? Is that beautiful creation of
Dickens, "Poor Nell," a real or a fictitious character? And is the
offence, after all, merely in the manner, and not the matter, of the
transgression? Is it that, instead of coming before the world printed,
puffed, and hot-pressed by the gentlemen of the Row, he ventured to
edite himself, and, instead o