than the rigidly honest man who
only borrows of them once, under pressure of the direst want. In the
one case the friends will not be at all surprised, and they will give.
In the other case they will be very much surprised, and they will
hesitate. Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his
career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty
lives in at the end of his career? When John-Howard-Philanthropist
wants to relieve misery he goes to find it in prisons, where crime is
wretched--not in huts and hovels, where virtue is wretched too. Who is
the English poet who has won the most universal sympathy--who makes the
easiest of all subjects for pathetic writing and pathetic painting?
That nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it by a
suicide--your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on
best, do you think, of two poor starving dressmakers--the woman who
resists temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under
temptation and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of
that second woman's fortune--it advertises her from length to breadth
of good-humoured, charitable England--and she is relieved, as the
breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as
the keeper of it. Come here, my jolly little Mouse! Hey! presto! pass!
I transform you, for the time being, into a respectable lady. Stop
there, in the palm of my great big hand, my dear, and listen. You
marry the poor man whom you love, Mouse, and one half your friends
pity, and the other half blame you. And now, on the contrary, you sell
yourself for gold to a man you don't care for, and all your friends
rejoice over you, and a minister of public worship sanctions the base
horror of the vilest of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks
afterwards at your table, if you are polite enough to ask him to
breakfast. Hey! presto! pass! Be a mouse again, and squeak. If you
continue to be a lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that
Society abhors crime--and then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes
and ears are really of any use to you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde,
am I not? I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of
the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine
is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the
bare bones beneath. I will get up on my big elephant's legs, before I
do myself a