To work on Mr. Eden’s plan is a herculean effort day by day repeated; but to set texts is easy, easier even than to learn them—­and how easy that is appears from the multitude of incurable felons who have swapped texts for tickets-of-leave.  Messieurs Lepel, who teach solitary depressed sinners the Bible with screw and lifted lash and no love nor pity, a word in your ear.  Begin a step higher.  Go first to some charitable priest and at his feet learn that Bible yourselves!

Forgive my heat, dear reader.  I am not an Eden, and these fellows rile me when I think of the good they might do, and they do nothing but force hypocrisy upon men who were bad enough without that.  I allow a certain latitude; don’t want to swim in hot water by quarreling with every madman or every dunce, but I do doubt any man’s right to combine contradictory vices.  Now these worthies are stupid yet wild, thick-headed yet delirious—­tortoises and March hares.

My sketch of Mr. Eden and his ways is feeble and unworthy.  But I conclude it with one master-stroke of eulogy—­He was the opposite of these men.

CHAPTER XLIII.

WE left Thomas Robinson writing his life.  He has written it.  It has been printed by prisoners and circulated among prisoners.  One copy lay in Robinson’s cell till he left the prison, and to this copy were appended Mr. Eden’s remarks in MS.

This autobiography is a self-drawn portrait of a true Bohemian and his mind from boyhood up to the date when he fell into my hands.

Unfortunately we cannot afford so late in our story to make any retrograde step.  The “Autobiography of a Thief” must therefore be thrust into my Appendix or printed elsewhere.

The reader has seen Robinson turned into a fiend by cruelty and turned back to a man by humanity.

On this followed many sacred, softening, improving lessons, and as he loved Mr. Eden his heart was open to them.

Most prisoners are very sensible of genuine kindness, and docile as wax in the hands of those who show it.  They are the easiest class in the world to impress.  The difficulty is to make the impression permanent.  But the people who pretend to you that kindness does not greatly affect, persuade and help convince them HAVE NEVER TRIED ANYTHING BUT BRUTALITY, and never will; for nothing greater, wiser or better is in them.

I will now indicate the other phases through which his mind passed in ——­ Jail.

Being shown that his crimes were virtually the cause of Mary’s hapless life and untimely death, and hard pressed by his father confessor, he fell into religious despondency; believed his case desperate, and his sins too many for Heaven’s mercy.

Of all states of mind this was the one Mr. Eden most dreaded.  He had observed that the notion that they cannot be reconciled to God and man is the cause of prisoners’ recklessness, and one great means by which jail officers and society, England A.D. 185—­, confirm them in ill.