hand, to let the fellow escape on the pretence, was to canonise impudence itself. The worthy judges, in their perplexity, applied to the king, who, under the guise of behaving delicately to their faith, was not sorry to have such an opportunity of joking it. His Majesty therefore pronounced, with becoming gravity, that the allegation of the soldier could not but have its due weight with all Catholic believers; but that in future it was forbidden any Prussian subject, military or civil, to accept a present from the Virgin Mary.

The district formerly rendered famous by the exploits of Scanderbeg, Prince of Epirus, and now become infamous by the tyranny of Ali Bey, has been very fertile in robbers. And no wonder, for a semi-barbarous people so governed become thieves by necessity. The name, indeed, as well as profession, is in such good receipt with an Albanian, that, according to late travellers, it is a common thing for him to begin a story by saying, "When I was a robber—" We remember reading of some Albanian or Sclavonian leader of banditti, who made his enemies suppose he had a numerous force with him, by distributing military caps upon the hedges.

There are some other nations who are all thieves, more or less; or comprise such numbers.of them as very much militate against the national character. Such are the piratical Malays; the still more infamous Algerines; the mongrel tribes between Arabia and Abyssinia. As to the Arabs, they have a prescriptive right, from tradition as well as local circumstances, to plunder everybody. The sanguinary ruffians of Ashantee and other black empires on the coast of Guinea are more like a government of murderers and ogres than thieves. They are the next ruffians, perhaps, in existence to slave-dealers. The gentlest nation of pilferers are the Otaheiteans; and something is to be said for their irresistible love of hatchets and old nails. Let the European trader, that is without sin, cast the first paragraph at them. Let him think what he should feel inclined to do, were a ship of some unknown nation to come upon his coast, with gold

and jewels lying scattered about the deck. For no less precious is iron to the South Sea Islander. A paradisaical state of existence would be to him, not the golden, but the iron age. An Otaheitean Jupiter would visit his Danaë in a shower of tenpenny nails.

We are now come to a very multitudinous set of candidates for the halter-the thieves of our own beloved country. For what we know of the French thieves is connected with them, excepting Cartouche; and we remember nothing of him, but that he was a great ruffian, and died upon that worse ruffian, the rack.

There is, to be sure, a very eminent instance of a single theft in the "Confessions of Rousseau ;" and it is the second greatest blot in his book, for he suffered a girl to be charged with and punished for the theft, and maintained the lie to her face, though she was his friend, and appealed to him with tears. But it may be said for him, at any rate, that the world would not have known the story but for himself; and if such a disclosure be regarded by some as an additional offence (which it may be thought by some very delicate as well as dishonest people), we must recollect that it was the object of his book to give a plain, unsophisticated account of a human being's experiences, and that many persons of excellent repute would have been found to have committed actions as bad, had they given accounts of themselves as candid. Dr Johnson was of opinion that all children were thieves and liars; and somebody, we believe a Scotchman, answered a fond speech about human nature, by exclaiming, that "human nature was a rogue and a vagabond, or so many laws would not have been necessary to restrain it." We venture to differ, on this occasion, with both Englishman and Scotchman. Laws in particular, taking the bad with the good, are quite as likely to have made rogues as restrained them. But we see, at any rate, what has been suspected of more orthodox persons than Rousseau; to say nothing of less charitable advantages which might be taken of such opinions.

He committed a petty theft; and miserably did his false shame, the parent of so many crimes, make him act. But he won back to their infants' lips the bosoms of thousands of mothers. He restored to their bereaved and helpless owners thousands of those fountains of health and joy; and before he is abused, even for worse things than the theft, let those whose virtue consists in custom think of this.

As we have mixed fictitious with real thieves in this article, in a manner, we fear, somewhat uncritical (and yet the fictions are most likely founded on fact; and the life of a real thief is a kind of droam and romance), we will despatch our fictitious English thieves before we come to the others. And we must make shorter work of it than we intended, or we shall never come to our friend Du Val. The length to which this article has stretched out, week after week, will be a warning to us how we render our paper liable to be run away with in future.

There is a very fine story of three thieves in Chaucer, which we must tell at large another time. The most prominent of the fabulous thieves in England is that bellipotent and immeasurable wag, Falstaff. If, for a momentary freak, he thought it villainous to steal, at the next moment he thought it villainous not to steal.

"Hal, I pr'ythee, trouble me no more with vanity. I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought. An old lord of the council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir; but I marked him not. And yet he talked very wisely; but I regarded him not. And yet he talked wisely; and in the street too.

"P. Henry. Thou didst well; for 'Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.'

"Falstaff. Oh, thou hast damnable iteration; and art, indeed, able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal; God forgive thee for it! Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked. I must give over this life, and I

will give it over: by the Lord, an I do not, I am a villain: I'll be damned for never a king's son in Christendom.

"P. Henry. Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack? "Falstaff. Where thou wilt, lad; I'll make one: an I do not, call me villain, and baffle me."

We must take care how we speak of Macheath, or we shall be said to be getting political again. Fielding's "Jonathan Wild the Great" is also, in this sense, "caviare to the multitude." But we would say more of him, if we had room. Count Fathom, a deliberate scoundrel, compounded of the Jonathan Wilds and the more equivocal Cagliostros and other adventurers, is a thief not at all to our taste. We are continually obliged to call his mother to our recollection, in order to bear him. The only instance in which the character of an absolute profligate pickpocket was ever made comparatively welcome to our graver feelings, is in the extraordinary novel of "Manon L'Escaut" by the Abbé Prevost. It is the story of a young man so passionately in love with a profligate female, that he follows her through every species of vice and misery, even when she is sent as a convict to New Orleans. His love, indeed, is returned. He is obliged to subsist upon her vices; and, in return, is induced to help her with his own, becoming a cheat and a swindler to supply her outrageous extravagances. On board the convict ship (if we recollect) he waits on her through every species of squalidness; the convict-dress and her shaved head only redoubling his love by the help of pity. This seems a shocking and very immoral book; yet multitudes of very reputable people have found a charm in it. The fact is, not only that Manon is beautiful, sprightly, really fond of her lover, and, after all, bccomes reformed; but that it is delightful, and ought to be so, to the human heart, to see a vein of sentiment and real goodness looking out through all this callous surface of guilt. It is like meeting with a tree in a squalid hole of a city,-a flower, or'a frank face, in a reprobate purlicu. The capabilities of human nature are not compromised. The virtue alone seems natural;

H

the guilt, as it so often is, seems artificial, and the result of some bad education, or other circumstance. Nor is anybody injured.

It is one of the shallowest of all shallow notions to talk of the harm of such works. Do we think nobody is to be harmed but the virtuous? Or that there are not privileged harms and vices to be got rid of, as well as unprivileged? No good-hearted person will be injured by reading "Manon L'Escaut." There is the belief in goodness in it; a faith, the want of which does so much harm both to the vicious and to the overrighteous.

The prince of all robbers, English or foreign, is undoubtedly Robin Hood. There is a worthy Scottish namesake of his, Rob Roy, who has lately had justice done to all his injuries by a countryman; and the author, it seems, has now come down from the borders to see the Rob of the elder times well treated. We were obliged to tear ourselves away from his first volume,* to go to this ill-repaying article. But Robin Hood will still remain the chief and "gentlest of thieves." He acted upon a larger scale, or in opposition to a larger injustice, to a whole political system. He "shook the superflux" to the poor, "and showed the heavens more just." However, what we have to say of him we must keep till the trees are in leaf again, and the greenwood shade delightful.

We dismiss, in one rabble-like heap, the real Jonathan Wilds, Abershaws, and other heroes of the Newgate Calendar, who have no redemption in their rascality. And after them, for gentlemen-valets, may go the Barringtons, Major Semples, and other sneaking rogues, who held on a tremulous career of iniquity, betwixt pilfering and repenting. Yet Jack Sheppard must not be forgotten, with his ingenious and daring breaks out of prison; nor Turpin, who is said to have ridden his horse with such swiftness from York to London, that he was enabled to set up an alibi. We have omitted to notice the celebrated Buccaneers of America; but these are fellows with regard to whom

* Of "Ivanhoe."