pronounced on him. The learned judge proceeded:
"Henry Fauntleroy. the Attorney-General does
not feel it necessary, in the discharge of his
duty, to proceed further with the other indictments
which have been preferred against you.
It is no part of my painful duty to pronounce
the awful sentence of the law, which will
follow the verdict which has just been recorded.
That unpleasing task will devolve on the learned
Recorder at the termination of the sessions;
but it is a part of my duty as a Christian
magistrate to implore you now that you bethink
yourself seriously of your latter end." A
convulsive sob from the wretched prisoner was
audible through the court. When the judge
had concluded, Fauntleroy was quite
overpowered, being barely able to raise his hands
as if in the attitude of prayer, which was the
only answer he was capable of making. He
was then removed from the bar, supported on
the arms of Mr. Wontner and one of his
friends, to the prison.

There remains a certain mystery still shrouding
the great Fauntleroy swindle. It is impossible
to conjecture for what purpose the
dishonest banker preserved in a private box so
careful and suicidal a statement of his own
misdoings. It might have been that he was
contemplating immediate flight even at the very
moment of his arrest, and wished to leave behind
him a clear and logical schedule that might
explain matters to, and absolve, his partners.
It might be that Fauntleroy (with that strange
confusion of feeling and aberration of judgment
that raises some thieves almost to the dignity of
monomaniacs) wished to leave ample and clear
testimony of the revenge his mistaken honour
had taken on the Bank of England for having
refused credit to his firm.

Our own hypothesis is, however, a harsher
one. It is a kindly trait in human nature, a
proof of its indelible goodness (and also its
inexhaustible gullibility, sneers the cynic), that
people are generally disposed to believe the last
confessions of great criminals. The man whose
blackened and corrupted soul has planned the
most treacherous and cruel crimes is usually
supposed to be so cleansed and purified by the
sight of twelve British jurymen and a wig of
flowing horsehair, that his declarations are heard
with all the confidence with which we listen
to the lispings of innocence and infancy. No
motive is suspected, no mental distortion allowed
for. We yield ourselves ready believers to a
dark tissue of subtle and ingenious falsehoods
invented by the man who is, as he knows, hotly
hunted by the hangman, and on the very brink
of the false floor from which the well-greased
bolt is already receding.

The man who has once plunged into the
slough of crime has long lived on lies. They
have become the very breath of his life, his
food, his implements, the scaffolding with which
he builds, the pitfall he sets for his victims, his
mask, his ambush, and his armour; they have
grown dear to him as his cruel knife and his still
smoking pistol. It is not a few hours in a dark
stone cell; it is not even twelve jurymen and an
entangled wig that will scare him from their use.
He has become a great devilish destructive
principle at war with the principles of truth
and goodness, and lies are but the twinings and
doublings that he makes in his desperate and
panting struggle to escape the slip knot. He
has petrified himself into an incarnate lie. As
for truth, it chokes him. and is snatched from
him before he can utter it.

We believe that Fauntleroy gambled, and
lived at Brighton in foolish splendour, under the
shadow of the fantastic palace of George the
Fourth. The great capitalist, the honourable
benevolent kind-hearted banker, had not moral
courage enough to face the world, in honest brave
poverty. He went on living as he had lived. He
silently stole thousands after thousands, buoyed
up by the secret excuse of an absurd and
illogical revenge, until he got deeper and deeper in
the slimy morass of fraud. Theft had to back up
theft. He could not stop himself. He must go
on now. Restitution became hopeless.

In the glitter of a thousand wax-lights, in his
soft-lined carriage on the Steyne, in the Park,
in Bond-street, the grave man in black moved
and passed, the model of bankers, the very rose
of Lombard-street. When he got alone and at
night, he became the agonised, timid, crushed,
miserable, broken-hearted man, trembling at
every door that opened, shuddering at every
whisper on the stairs, startled at each jarring
window, palsied every morning he opened the
paper and read another bank failure, another
scene on the Newgate scaffold,——every time
the fatal dividend-day came round, lest his
victims, from a moment's delay, should scent out
the long series of cruel and treacherous theft.
Riches, show, splendour, Brighton villas, money-
bags, diamonds, are indeed pitiful and contemptible
when we look at nine years passed in this
torture.

The gay and pleasant time had passed; the days
of splendour, ostentation, arrogance, and luxury
in the club-rooms or the Steyne, in the
Berners-street parlour, at the great dinner-parties
(mentioned by Hazlitt), had gone by. Those
few simple words, written in a bold clear
business-like hand, had been as the sowing of
dragons' teeth; they had evoked police-officers,
jurymen, judges, and last of all the hangman.
The slow dawning day of terrible retribution had
at last come. The honourable and benevolent
banker was now to stand forth over Newgate
door, before a hundred thousand cruel, eager,
brutal, pitiless faces, looming white through
the fog of a dull, dismal, cold, wet November
morning.

Hardly since the Perreaus, the wine-
merchants, who were hung in 1776, or since Dr.
Dodd, the popular preacher, paid the penalty at
Tyburn, for forgery, in 1777, had the contemplated
execution of a gentleman moved more
pity, or excited such deep and universal interest.
One does not see a great London banker
hung every day. The sight drew together
half the City. At daybreak, a vast crowd began
to roll on towards the great gloomy blind stone
house on the hill, to scan its hard repulsive