OUT DETECTIVES.

_The "Javerts," "Old Sleuths" and "Buckets" of Fiction as Contrasted
with the Genuine Article--Popular Notions of Detective Work Altogether
Erroneous--An Ex-Detective's Views--The Divorce Detective_.

We are told that "all the world loves a lover," and it is, perhaps,
equally true that most people like to read the details of clever
detective exploits. The deeds of criminals naturally awaken the emotions
of horror, fear, curiosity and awe in proportion to their heinousness
and the mystery by which they are enveloped. Consequently the detective
officer who pierces the mystery--unravels it thread by thread, and by
unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand on
the criminal--is at once invested, in the popular mind, with qualities
approaching the preternatural. The vivid and fertile imagination of the
literary romancist magnifies the illusion. The detective of the
successful novel resembles the Deity in his attributes of ubiquity and
omniscience. In whatever city his functions are exercised we may be sure
that he knows every man-Jack of the criminal classes, their past and
present history, their occupation and their residence. He knows all
their names, their aliases and their soubriquets, just as Julius Caesar,
as tradition tells, knew all the soldiers of his army. Moreover, they
are invariably individuals of remarkable personality. While endowed with
a strong spice of the world, the flesh and the devil, they are at the
same time clothed in a sort of white robe of social immaculacy. They are
half lamb and half wolf, if such a paradoxical being were possible.

Take, for instance, the Inspector Javert of Victor Hugo: A tall man,
dressed in an iron-grey great coat, armed with a thick cane, and wearing
a hat with a turndown brim; grave with an almost menacing gravity, with
a trick of folding his arms, shaking his head and raising his upper lip
with the lower as high as his nose, in a sort of significant grimace. He
had a stub nose with two enormous nostrils, toward which enormous
whiskers mounted on his cheeks. His forehead could not be seen, for it
was hidden by his hat; his eyes could not be seen because they were lost
under his eyebrows; his chin was plunged into his cravat; his hands were
covered by his cuffs, and his cane was carried under his coat. But when
the opportunity arrived there could be seen suddenly emerging from all
this shadow, as from an ambush, an angular, narrow for