uld not have proved his
own guilt more clearly had he been the ablest prosecuting counsel in
Britain. He held in his hand a voluminous statement which, as it seems,
he wished to read before sentence of death was passed. The Court could
not permit the nation's time to be thus expended; so the convict handed
his manuscript to a reporter--and we thus have possibly the most
absolutely curious of all extant thieves' literature. Somewhere in the
recesses of Fury's wild heart there must have been good concealed; for
he confessed his worst crime in the interests of justice, and he went to
the scaffold with a serious and serene courage which almost made of him
a dignified person. But, on his own confession, he must have been all
his life long an unmitigated rascal--a predatory beast of the most
dangerous kind. From his youth upward he had lived as a professional
thief, and his pilferings were various and extensive. The glimpses of
sordid villainy which he frankly gives are so poignantly effective that
they put into the shade the most dreadful phases in the life of Villon.
He was a mean sneaking wretch who supported a miserable existence on the
fruits of other people's industry, and he closed his list of crimes by
brutally stabbing an unhappy woman who had never harmed him. The fellow
had genuine literary skill and a good deal of culture; his confession is
very different from any of those contained in the _Newgate
Calendar_--infinitely different from the crude horror of the statement
which George Borrow quotes as a masterpiece of simple and direct
writing. Here is Borrow's specimen, by-the-way--"So I went with them to
a music-booth, where they made me almost drunk with gin and began to
talk their flash language, which I did not understand"--and so on. But
this dry simplicity is not in Fury's line. He has studied philosophy; he
has reasoned keenly; and, as one goes on through his terrible narrative,
one finds that he has mental capacity of a high order. He was as mean a
rascal as Noah Claypole: and yet he had a fine clear-seeing intellect.
Now what does this gallows-bird tell us? Why, his whole argument is
intended to prove that he was an ill-used victim of society! Such a
perversion has probably never been quite equalled; but it remains there
to show us how firmly my theory stands--that the real scoundrel never
knows himself to be a scoundrel. Had Fury settled down in a back street
and employed his genius in writing stories, he cou