To whitewash the scoundrel is to put upon him the heaviest dishonour:  a dishonour comparable only to the monstrously illogical treatment of the condemned.  When once a hero has forfeited his right to comfort and freedom, when he is deemed no longer fit to live upon earth, the Prison Chaplain, encouraging him to a final act of hypocrisy, gives him a free pass (so to say) into another and more exclusive world.  So, too, the moralist would test the thief by his own narrow standard, forgetting that all professions are not restrained by the same code.  The road has its ordinances as well as the lecture-room; and if the thief is commonly a bad moralist, it is certain that no moralist was ever a great thief.  Why then detract from a man’s legitimate glory?  Is it not wiser to respect ‘that deep intuition of oneness,’ which Coleridge says is ’at the bottom of our faults as well as our virtues?’ To recognise that a fault in an honest man is a virtue in a scoundrel?  After all, he is eminent who, in obedience to his talent, does prodigies of valour unrivalled by his fellows.  And none has so many opportunities of various eminence as the scoundrel.

The qualities which may profitably be applied to a cross life are uncommon and innumerable.  It is not given to all men to be light-brained, light-limbed, light-fingered.  A courage which shall face an enemy under the starlight, or beneath the shadow of a wall, which shall track its prey to a well-defended lair, is far rarer than a law-abiding cowardice.  The recklessness that risks all for a present advantage is called genius, if a victorious general urge it to success; nor can you deny to the intrepid Highwayman, whose sudden resolution triumphs at an instant of peril, the possession of an admirable gift.  But all heroes have not proved themselves excellent at all points.  This one has been distinguished for the courtly manner of his attack, that other for a prescience which discovers booty behind a coach-door or within the pocket of a buttoned coat.  If Cartouche was a master of strategy, Barrington was unmatched in another branch; and each may claim the credit due to a peculiar eminence.  It is only thus that you may measure conflicting talents:  as it were unfair to judge a poet by a brief experiment in prose, so it would be monstrous to cheapen the accomplishments of a pickpocket, because he bungled at the concealment of his gains.

A stern test of artistry is the gallows.  Perfect behaviour at an enforced and public scrutiny may properly be esteemed an effect of talent—­an effect which has not too often been rehearsed.  There is no reason why the Scoundrel, fairly beaten at the last point in the game, should not go to his death without swagger and without remorse.  At least he might comfort himself with such phrases as ’a dance without the music,’ and he has not often been lacking in courage.  What he has missed is dignity:  his pitfalls have been unctuosity, on the one side, bravado on the other.  It was the Prison Ordinary, who first misled him into the assumption of a piety which neither preacher nor disciple understood.  It was the Prison Ordinary, who persuaded him to sign his name to a lying confession of guilt, drawn up in accordance with a foolish and inexorable tradition, and to deliver such a last dying speech as would not disappoint the mob.