th Canning was sentenced to seven years' transportation,
and, indeed, if their biographers are to be believed, all the other
ladies made miserable ends. There is nothing triumphant about their
badness. Even from the point of view of this world they had better
have been good. In fact, squalor is the badge of the whole tribe. Some
of them, probably--Elizabeth Brownrigg, for example--were mad. This
last-named poor creature bore sixteen children to a house-painter and
plasterer, and then became a parish mid-wife, and only finally a
baby-farmer. Her cruelty to her apprentices had madness in every
detail. To include her in this volume was wholly unnecessary. She
lives but in George Canning's famous parody on Southey's sonnet to the
regicide Marten.

With those sentimentalists who maintain that all bad people are mad I
will have no dealings. It is sheer nonsense; lives of great men all
remind us it is sheer nonsense. Some of our greatest men have been
infernal scoundrels--pre-eminently bad men--with nothing mad about
them, unless it be mad to get on in the world and knock people about
in it.

_Twelve Bad Women_ contains much interesting matter, but, on the
whole, it is depressing. It seems very dull to be bad. Perhaps the
editor desired to create this impression; if so, he has succeeded.
Hannah More had fifty times more fun in her life than all these
courtesans and criminals put together. The note of jollity is
entirely absent. It was no primrose path these unhappy women
traversed, though that it led to the everlasting bonfire it were
unchristian to doubt. The dissatisfaction I confessed to at the
beginning returns upon me as a cloud at the end; but, for all that, I
rejoice the book is in a second edition, and I hope soon to hear it is
in a third, for it has a moral tendency.

ITINERARIES

Anyone who is teased by the notion that it would be pleasant to be
remembered, in the sense of being read, after death, cannot do better
to secure that end than compose an Itinerary and leave it behind him
in manuscript, with his name legibly inscribed thereon. If an honest
bit of work, noting distances, detailing expenses, naming landmarks,
moors, mountains, harbours, docks, buildings--indeed, anything which,
as lawyers say, savours of realty--and but scantily interspersed with
reflections, and with no quotations, why, then, such a piece of work,
however long publication may be delayed--and a century or two will not
matter in