eived to the end accomplished; that thirst
after quick returns to ingenious toil, and breathless spurrings along
short cuts to the goal, which we see everywhere around us, from the
Mechanics' Institute to the Stock Market,--beginning in education with
the primers of infancy, deluging us with "Philosophies for the Million"
and "Sciences made Easy;" characterizing the books of our writers,
the speeches of our statesmen, no less than the dealings of our
speculators,--seem, I confess, to me to constitute a very diseased and
very general symptom of the times. I hold that the greatest friend to
man is labour; that knowledge without toil, if possible, were worthless;
that toil in pursuit of knowledge is the best knowledge we can attain;
that the continuous effort for fame is nobler than fame itself; that it
is not wealth suddenly acquired which is deserving of homage, but
the virtues which a man exercises in the slow pursuit of wealth,--the
abilities so called forth, the self-denials so imposed; in a word, that
Labour and Patience are the true schoolmasters on earth. While occupied
with these ideas and this belief, whether right or wrong, and slowly
convinced that it was only in that species of composition with which I
was most familiar that I could work out some portion of the plan that
I began to contemplate, I became acquainted with the histories of two
criminals existing in our own age,--so remarkable, whether from the
extent and darkness of the guilt committed, whether from the glittering
accomplishments and lively temper of the one, the profound knowledge and
intellectual capacities of the other, that the examination and analysis
of characters so perverted became a study full of intense, if gloomy,
interest.

In these persons there appear to have been as few redeemable points as
can be found in Human Nature, so far as such points may be traced in the
kindly instincts and generous passions which do sometimes accompany
the perpetration of great crimes, and, without excusing the individual,
vindicate the species. Yet, on the other hand, their sanguinary
wickedness was not the dull ferocity of brutes; it was accompanied with
instruction and culture,--nay, it seemed to me, on studying their lives
and pondering over their own letters, that through their cultivation
itself we could arrive at the secret of the ruthless and atrocious
pre-eminence in evil these Children of Night had attained; that here
the monster vanished into th