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

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There have been more daring highway robberies and more extensive burglaries than any which he is known to have committed.

But few men have caused more widespread terror, or created more profound attention by the suddenness and the brilliant success of their exploits.

It would be a great misfortune if the boldness and fearlessness of this bad man were to blind even the most thoughtless to the utter worthlessness of his character.

In shadowing forth his lawless career we are under the impression that it will act as a warning to those who peruse these pages.

It will prove beyond all question the truth of the axiom, “That a life of crime is always a life of care.”

In nothing does his baseness more transparently appear than in his miserable apologies and self-justifications with which his religious experiences are interlarded.

Assuming, as we are anxious to do, that these pious utterances of his later days are not wilfully insincere, they nevertheless betray an utter moral blindness.

He was very willing to call his past life wicked in general terms, but for his worst transgressions he had some extenuating plea, which destroyed the validity of his assumed penitence.