of his sublime dishonesty; when houses of the most reputed
wealth and profuse splendour, whose affairs Crauford had transacted,
were discovered to have been for years utterly undermined and beggared,
and only supported by the extraordinary genius of the individual by
whose extraordinary guilt, now no longer concealed, they were suddenly
and irretrievably destroyed; when it was ascertained that, for nearly
the fifth part of a century, a system of villany had been carried on
throughout Europe, in a thousand different relations, without a single
breath of suspicion, and yet which a single breath of suspicion could
at once have arrested and exposed; when it was proved that a man whose
luxury had exceeded the pomp of princes, and whose wealth was supposed
more inexhaustible than the enchanted purse of Fortunatus, had for
eighteen years been a penniless pensioner upon the prosperity of others;
when the long scroll of this almost incredible fraud was slowly, piece
by piece, unrolled before the terrified curiosity of his public, an
invading army at the Temple gates could scarcely have excited such
universal consternation and dismay.

The mob, always the first to execute justice, in their own inimitable
way took vengeance upon Crauford by burning the house no longer his,
and the houses of his partners, who were the worst and most innocent
sufferers for his crime. No epithet of horror and hatred was too severe
for the offender; and serious apprehension for the safety of Newgate,
his present habitation, was generally expressed. The more saintly
members of that sect to which the hypocrite had ostensibly belonged,
held up their hands, and declared that the fall of the Pharisee was a
judgment of Providence. Nor did they think it worth while to make, for a
moment, the trifling inquiry how far the judgment of Providence was also
implicated in the destruction of the numerous and innocent families he
had ruined!

But, whether from that admiration for genius, common to the vulgar,
which forgets all crime in the cleverness of committing it, or from that
sagacious disposition peculiar to the English, which makes a hero of any
person eminently wicked, no sooner did Crauford's trial come on than the
tide of popular feeling experienced a sudden revulsion. It became, in an
instant, the fashion to admire and to pity a gentleman so talented and
so unfortunate. Likenesses of Mr. Crauford appeared in every print-shop
in town; the papers discovered