very soul of a man, we cannot hope
to reach. Thus far may we go, no farther. It is rarely indeed that a man
lays bare his whole soul, and even when he does we can never be quite
sure that he is telling us all the truth, that he is not keeping back
some vital secret. It is no doubt better so, and that it should be left
to the writer of imagination to picture for us a man's inmost soul. The
study of crime will help him to that end. It will help us also in the
ethical appreciation of good and evil in individual conduct, about which
our notions have been somewhat obscured by too narrow a definition
of what constitutes crime. These themes, touched on but lightly and
imperfectly in these pages, are rich in human interest.

And so it is hardly a matter for surprise that the poet and the
philosopher sat up late one night talking about murders.

The Life of Charles Peace

"Charles Peace, or the Adventures of a Notorious Burglar," a large
volume published at the time of his death, gives a full and accurate
account of the career of Peace side by side with a story of the Family
Herald type, of which he is made the hero. "The Life and Trial of
Charles Peace" (Sheffield, 1879), "The Romantic Career of a Great
Criminal" (by N. Kynaston Gaskell, London 1906), and "The Master
Criminal," published recently in London give useful information. I have
also consulted some of the newspapers of the time. There is a delightful
sketch of Peace in Mr. Charles Whibley's "Book of Scoundrels."

I

HIS EARLY YEARS

Charles Peace told a clergyman who had an interview with him in prison
shortly before his execution that he hoped that, after he was gone, he
would be entirely forgotten by everybody and his name never mentioned
again.

Posterity, in calling over its muster-roll of famous men, has refused
to fulfil this pious hope, and Charley Peace stands out as the one
great personality among English criminals of the nineteenth century. In
Charley Peace alone is revived that good-humoured popularity which
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fell to the lot of Claude
Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. But Peace has one grievance
against posterity; he has endured one humiliation which these heroes
have been spared. His name has been omitted from the pages of the
"Dictionary of National Biography." From Duval, in the seventeenth,
down to the Mannings, Palmer, Arthur Orton, Morgan and Kelly, the
bushrangers, in the nineteenth cent