There are yet other parallels which I might mention, although of minor importance; but I hardly think they would be likely to add any greater probability to my contention."

It is a somewhat curious fact that George Pettie, as a writer, should be best known to readers of Elizabethan letters as the author of the Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure—a collection of stories, published about 1576, which gained a wide popularity as soon as printed. The work failed, however, to meet with the approbation of one very capable judge of literary matters, Anthony à Wood; who, when he stated that Pettie' was much commended for his neat style as any of his time,' must, I fancy, have been thinking chiefly of his translation of Guazzo; which, independently of any attraction it may have for Shakspearian scholars, is in every sense a charming example of English prose writing at its very best. There is hardly a dull page in it from its opening to the end; every sentence is lucidly framed and, in many cases, brilliantly expressed; and lit, as it not infrequently is, by flashes of quaint and genuine humourteeming with pithily turned precepts on behaviour, and all else that goes to make society agreeable to mankind in every station-it rises at times to a serious eloquence which may be compared with much of the finest prose writing of the spacious days' of the late sixteenth century. There are few volumes that would make a more interesting reprint.

EDWARD SULLIVAN.

'I have already shown, in the case of the word 'ranke,' the value of such a book as Pettie's Translation as a means of expounding a verbal difficulty resulting from the change which a long course of years has effected in our language. A like instance of its utility as an interpreter appears in a remarkable way in connection with a passage in Macbeth, where the line:

'Their daggers unmannerly breeched with gore.'-(ii. 3, 122.)

has fairly puzzled the commentators, many of whom (including the editors of the New English Dictionary) take the word 'breeched' as meaning, in a figurative sense, * covered, or clothed, with breeches'! Mr. Charles Mackay's explanation of the word as derived from Keltic, breach,' a spot (Glossary of Obscure Words in Shakespeare, etc. London, 1887), although he does not quote any other example of its use in English in this sense, must be taken to be the true one, when we read such a passage as the following in the Civile Conversation: which have their wit so breeched that they cannot discerne sweete from soure.'—(i. 4.)

AN EX-PRISONER

ON PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS

I HAVE read with no little interest the article which appeared in the January number of this Review from the pen of Sir Robert Anderson on the best means of dealing with professional criminals. The article in question is one of a series on the same subject by the same writer. I read these en bloc some time ago, but I did not then contemplate inditing a reply to them. Nor should I as a matter of fact criticise Sir Robert Anderson's very latest pronouncement on his pet subject were it not that the Home Secretary, at the close of last session, laid on the table of the House of Commons a Bill to amend the law relating to Penal Servitude with a view to the Bill being considered during the recess. This Bill is presumably to be reintroduced during the coming session. The object of it is, briefly, to make it hot' for the professional criminal. Sir Robert Anderson evidently imagines his several articles have had a direct result in producing this Bill. That may be so, but quite evidently Sir Robert Anderson only intends to take the Bill as something on account. He apparently has a much shorter, and certainly far more drastic, panacea for abolishing the professional criminal than that contemplated by the Bill. Sir Robert Anderson's remedy for dealing with a certain section of his fellow creatures, who have broken the law a certain number of times, and have been tracked down and punished for their dereliction, is to permanently incarcerate them until public opinion is sufficiently ripe for exterminating them as mere vermin. When that time arrives, presumably a lethal chamber will be attached to every large prison into which the professional criminal will be introduced for the same purpose as the superfluous dogs in the Battersea Dogs' Home are conducted to the lethal chamber therein. I have no doubt, when the time does arrive, if it ever should, for this manner of treating the professional criminal to be brought into vogue, there will not be wanting gentlemen who will indite articles for the reviews, poking fun at the 'humanity-mongers' and pleading that a painless death in a lethal chamber is far too lenient a method of dealing with such human vermin.

Perhaps I had better at once say that I am not myself what is usually termed a professional criminal. But I have had the misfortune to undergo a term of penal servitude, and have accordingly had some opportunity of arriving at the ideas and opinions of professional criminals, and can, I think, bring to bear on the subject of the best means of dealing with them something other than merely theoretical views. I have lived with these men, I have made a close study of them for some years, and I certainly claim to know more of them practically than Sir Robert Anderson does, despite his vast experience in Scotland Yard. At the same time perhaps I had better say that I have not the slightest doubt Sir Robert Anderson is perfectly sincere in the opinions he expresses. Indeed, with some of those opinions I find myself in complete agreement. No man has ever indited truer or more pregnant words in regard to the present prison system than those of Sir Robert Anderson in the article which appeared in the last issue of this Review. He says: In certain cases penal servitude is barbarously cruel. In such cases, indeed, its operation is really a disgrace to a civilised country. But to the gaol bird there is no element of cruelty in it. He settles down to it in the spirit in which an officer on service accepts exile in some particularly undesirable foreign station. There is nothing in it likely to elevate and reform anybody.' These words are, as I have said, the truth and nothing but the truth. It is, I think, deplorable that such things should be true in the fourth year of the twentieth century. It is, in my opinion, still more deplorable that the man who has had sufficient light to convince himself of these facts, and sufficient courage to publicly assert them, should at the same time put forward a plea for a manner of dealing with the professional criminal which, if put into force, would be a disgrace to our civilisation, a travesty on our Christianity.

Mr. Justin McCarthy, in the History of our Own Times, has remarked, and remarked correctly, that in no country except England is there a distinct criminal class, and he contends, and I believe rightly, that this criminal class is merely the natural result of our existing prison system. In other words, that English prisons, instead of being simply punitive or simply reformative institutions, or both combined, are in reality forcing-houses for criminals. Mr. McCarthy quotes the expressed belief of an ex-prisoner that the present English prison system takes out of a man the heart of a man and puts in its place the heart of a beast. I believe this to be the literal truth, and, if it be the truth, the man so metamorphosed can hardly be blamed if, upon his release, he acts as a beast. That so large a proportion of ex-prisoners do not so act is I think greatly to their credit. Be that as it may, I feel no hesitation whatever in asserting that the English prison system is largely, if not altogether, responsible for the manufacture of the English professional criminal.

Sir Robert Anderson's remedy is not to reform the prison system or attempt to reform the criminal, but to seize on the professional criminal and keep him permanently incarcerated in the place that has made him what he is until the time arrives when, public opinion having been sufficiently educated to sanction it, the professional criminal will, instead of being incarcerated, be exterminated.

It is impossible to read Sir Robert Anderson's article without perceiving that it is one likely to have a convincing effect on most persons who may peruse it. More false conclusions are arrived at in this world from the use of false analogies than from any other kind of argument. It is a peculiarly false analogy which has probably rendered Sir Robert Anderson's article so convincing to the superficial reader. This false analogy has done duty not only in his last article but in all his previous articles on the same subject. Sir Robert Anderson draws a comparison between some particularly malevolent wild beast unknown to natural history and a professional criminal as known, in theory, to Sir Robert Anderson. 'If,' he says, superstition decreed that a dangerous beast must neither be destroyed nor permanently kept in confinement, every year added to the period for which it might be shut up would, of course, be a practical benefit to the community. But most people would think it not only stupid but wicked to turn it loose at all.' The attempted argument from a false analogy is plausible, but, I contend, entirely fallacious when closely examined. Let me examine it for a moment. Suppose the fierceness of Sir Robert Anderson's wild beast, which, by the way, was originally a tame beast, had been induced by a long period of confinement, during the whole of which it had been goaded, pricked, halfstarved, and subjected to a long course of irritating and petty annoyances which had resulted in the beast' being reduced to an extremely savage condition. Suppose that, at the acme of its savageness, it had been released from confinement and given just sufficient sustenance to keep it alive for a week or two, and that, at the expiration of that period, no further sustenance or means of obtaining sustenance were provided, and no man would have the 'beast' at any price or upon any consideration. Suppose then the 'beast' in its obstinacy determined, by some process of mental obfuscation, that, having been sent into the world presumably to live, as no man would help it, it would help itself. The 'beast' does help itself and, being detected in so doing, is once again subjected to the confinement, the goading, pricking, and irritating process, continued this time for a longer period. Rendered even more savage, it is in due course once again released, has the same experience, is once again detected in supplying itself because it has no other alternative. The 'beast' this time is decided by 'the authorities' to be an habitually ill-disposed animal, incurably savage, innately depraved, and all the rest of it, and, according to Sir Robert Anderson's plan, should, if not at once exterminated, be,

at any rate, permanently shut up and presumably rendered more savage still. No one apparently, unless he be a 'humanity-monger,' has ever thought, or, if he has thought, has ever suggested the ceasing of the goading and irritating process, the kindly treatment of the 'beast' on its release from captivity and the making of some attempt to bring it back to its former condition of tameness. I have considered the beast' from a purely material standpoint. There are, however, men who believe that the particular 'beast' referred to by Sir Robert Anderson is not in fact a mere beast but has a soul, that that soul is immortal, and that the possessor of it is linked to his fellow-creatures from that very fact by other ties than link the beasts of the field, to which it has been compared, to man. Only the 'humanitymongers' seemingly voice the brotherhood of man as regards the treatment of actual and ex-prisoners, and in this great Christian country no one save they appears to consider that even a professional criminal, who, after all, is the possessor of a human soul, however degraded the possessor may have become, deserves and should receive from his fellow-men some other treatment than that of a wild beast. If his fellow-men have for some reason, good or bad, deprived him of his liberty and subjected him to various restraints and punishments of an extremely artificial nature, which, if they have any effect at all, can only render him more unfitted for the battle of life, those fellow-creatures have, I submit, an obligation and a moral responsibility in regard to that man which cannot be got rid of, however they may be covered over or confused, by drastic proposals of putting the man where he will be out of sight and out of mind.

I am not concerned to deal with Sir Robert Anderson's quotations of the obiter dicta of several judges on the subject of the treatment of professional criminals. I have a great respect for the judges as a body, but, after all, they know little or nothing as to the treatment of prisoners when undergoing the sentences inflicted on them; and at the best, a man who is continually being brought into contact with crime, constantly talking high morality from the Bench, and everlastingly sentencing his fellow-creatures to long terms of imprisonment, is prone to take a somewhat morbid view of criminals and their ways. Quite recently a prisoner was arraigned at the Old Bailey on a charge of bigamy. The man had previously served a term of penal servitude for some other offence and had narrated his experiences of convict life in a popular magazine. The prosecuting counsel mentioned the fact to the judge, and suggested that perhaps his lordship might have read the narrative in question. The judge replied that such things had no interest whatever for him, and his observation was received with laughter. This is, I fear, the spirit in which too many judges send men to long terms of penal servitude. The details of their incarceration do not interest the judge who, by some process of mental arithmetic I have never been able to com