Will the villains ever be discovered and punished who stole my fruit?  Some unlucky rascals who rob orchards are caught up the tree at once.  Some rob through life with impunity.  If I, for my part, were to try and get up the smallest tree, on the darkest night, in the most remote orchard, I wager any money I should be found out—­be caught by the leg in a man-trap, or have Towler fastening on me.  I always am found out; have been; shall be.  It’s my luck.  Other men will carry off bushels of fruit, and get away undetected, unsuspected; whereas I know woe and punishment would fall upon me were I to lay my hand on the smallest pippin.  So be it.  A man who has this precious self-knowledge will surely keep his hands from picking and stealing, and his feet upon the paths of virtue.

I will assume, my benevolent friend and present reader, that you yourself are virtuous, not from a fear of punishment, but from a sheer love of good:  but us you and I walk through life, consider what hundreds of thousands of rascals we must have met, who have not been found out at all.  In high places and low, in Clubs and on ’Change, at church or the balls and routs of the nobility and gentry, how dreadful it is for benevolent beings like you and me to have to think these undiscovered though not unsuspected scoundrels are swarming!  What is the difference between you and a galley-slave?  Is yonder poor wretch at the hulks not a man and a brother too?  Have you ever forged, my dear sir?  Have you ever cheated your neighbor?  Have you ever ridden to Hounslow Heath and robbed the mail?  Have you ever entered a first-class railway carriage, where an old gentleman sat alone in a sweet sleep, daintily murdered him, taken his pocket-book, and got out at the next station?  You know that this circumstance occurred in France a few months since.  If we have travelled in France this autumn we may have met the ingenious gentleman who perpetrated this daring and successful coup.  We may have found him a well-informed and agreeable man.  I have been acquainted with two or three gentlemen who have been discovered after—­after the performance of illegal actions.  What?  That agreeable rattling fellow we met was the celebrated Mr. John Sheppard?  Was that amiable quiet gentleman in spectacles the well-known Mr. Fauntleroy?  In Hazlitt’s admirable paper, “Going to a Fight,” he describes a dashing sporting fellow who was in the coach, and who was no less a man than the eminent destroyer of Mr. William Weare.  Don’t tell me that you would not like to have met (out of business) Captain Sheppard, the Reverend Doctor Dodd, or others rendered famous by their actions and misfortunes, by their lives and their deaths.  They are the subjects of ballads, the heroes of romance.  A friend of mine had the house in May Fair, out of which poor Doctor Dodd was taken handcuffed.  There was the paved hall over which he stepped.  That little room at the side was, no doubt, the study where he composed his elegant sermons.  Two years since