Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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His midnight adventures have not that strong flavour of exciting romance we find in the histories of bygone marauders.

He was practical to austerity, and never made a move that was not calculated and carried out to answer a severe business purpose.

No doubt, as we have before observed, his artfulness, his daring, and other qualities made him a remarkable man.

Unhappily for himself and his endowments, which would have enabled him to win a respectable position in an honest career, appear to have been singularly fitted for the life he chose to follow.

Although he has been charged with many offences he never committed, it may be safely believed that during the thirty years or so he was preying upon the public he has done an enormous amount of mischief.

A poet is said to be one in ten thousand. A man of the special capacity of Peace is far more rare.

He seems like the conquerors, and produces on his fellow-men the same sort of hope that he may be the last of his class.

Probably there is not another man in England who could have run the race of this criminal—​by night a thief and a murderer; by day a citizen of credit, who went abroad without fear in the busy haunts of men.