the High-toby-splice descends in these days of avarice and stupidity.  The legislators who decreed that henceforth the rope should be reserved for the ultimate crime of murder were inspired with a proper sense of humour and proportion.  It would be ignoble to dignify that ugly enterprise of to-day, the cracking of suburban cribs, with the same punishment which was meted out to Claude Duval and the immortal Switcher.  Better for the churl the disgrace of Portland than the chance of heroism and respect given at the Tree!

And where are the heroes whose art was as glorious as their intrepidity?  One and all they have climbed the ascent of Tyburn.

One and all, they have leaped resplendent from the cart.  The world, which was the joyous playground of highwaymen and pickpockets, is now the Arcadia of swindlers.  The man who once went forth to meet his equal on the road, now plunders the defenceless widow or the foolish clergyman from the security of an office.  He has changed Black Bess for a brougham, his pistol for a cigar; a sleek chimney-pot sits upon the head, which once carried a jaunty hat, three-cornered; spats have replaced the tops of ancient times; and a heavy fur coat advertises at once the wealth and inaction of the modern brigand.  No longer does he roam the heaths of Hounslow or Bagshot; no longer does he track the grazier to a country fair.  Fearful of an encounter, he chooses for the fields of his enterprise the byways of the City, and the advertisement columns of the smugly Christian Press.  He steals without risking his skin or losing his respectability.  The suburb, wherein he brings up a blameless, flat-footed family, regards him as its most renowned benefactor.  He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes charities, and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a second-rate Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him, in the town-hall of his adopted borough.

How much worse is he than the High-toby-cracks of old!  They were as brave as lions; he is a very louse for timidity.  His conduct is meaner than the conduct of the most ruffianly burglar that ever worked a centre-bit.  Of art he has not the remotest inkling:  though his greed is bounded by the Bank of England, he understands not the elegancies of life; he cares not how he plumps his purse, so long as it be full; and if he were capable of conceiving a grand effect, he would willingly surrender it for a pocketed half-crown.  This side the Channel, in brief, romance and the picturesque are dead; and in France, the last refuge of crime, there are already signs of decay.  The Abbe Bruneau caught a whiff of style and invention from the past.  That other Abbe—­Rosslot was his name—­shone forth a pure creator:  he owed his prowess to the example of none.  But in Paris crime is too often passionel, and a crime passionel is a crime with a purpose, which, like the novel with a purpose, is conceived by a dullard, and carried out for the gratification of the middle-class.