Before all things, he is sanguine; he believes that Chance, the great god of his endeavour, fights upon his side.  Whatever is lacking to-day, to-morrow’s enterprise will fulfil, and if only the omens be favourable, he fears neither detection nor the gallows.  His courage proceeds from this sanguine temperament, strengthened by shame and tradition rather than from a self-controlled magnanimity; he hopes until despair is inevitable, and then walks firmly to the gallows, that no comrade may suspect the white feather.  His ambition, too, is the ambition of the savage or of the child; he despises such immaterial advantages as power and influence, being perfectly content if he have a smart coat on his back and a bottle of wine at his elbow.  He would rather pick a lock than batter a constitution, and the world would be well lost, if he and his doxy might survey the ruin in comfort.

But if his ambition be modest, his love of notoriety is boundless.  He must be famous, his name must be in the mouths of men, he must be immortal (for a week) in a rough woodcut.  And then, what matters it how soon the end?  His braveries have been hawked in the street; his prowess has sold a Special Edition; he is the first of his race, until a luckier rival eclipses him.  Thus, also, his dandyism is inevitable:  it is not enough for him to cover his nakedness—­he must dress; and though his taste is sometimes unbridled, it is never insignificant.  Indeed, his biographers have recorded the expression of his fancy in coats and small-clothes as patiently and enthusiastically as they have applauded his courage.  And truly the love of magnificence, which he shares with all artists, is sincere and characteristic.  When an accomplice of Jonathan Wild’s robbed Lady M——­n at Windsor, his equipage cost him forty pounds; and Nan Hereford was arrested for shoplifting at the very moment that four footmen awaited her return with an elegant sedan-chair.

His vanity makes him but a prudish lover, who desires to woo less than to be wooed; and at all times and through all moods he remains the primeval sentimentalist.  He will detach his life entirely from the catchwords which pretend to govern his actions; he will sit and croon the most heartrending ditties in celebration of home-life and a mother’s love, and then set forth incontinently upon a well-planned errand of plunder.  For all his artistry, he lacks balance as flagrantly as a popular politician or an advanced journalist.  Therefore it is the more remarkable that in one point he displays a certain caution:  he boggles at a superfluous murder.  For all his contempt of property, he still preserves a respect for life, and the least suspicion of unnecessary brutality sets not only the law but his own fellows against him.  Like all men whose god is Opportunity, he is a reckless gambler; and, like all gamblers, he is monstrously extravagant.  In brief, he is a tangle of picturesque qualities, which, until our own generation, was incapable of nothing save dulness.