He was practical to austerity, and never made a move that was not calculated and carried out to answer a severe business purpose.
No doubt, as we have before observed, his artfulness, his daring, and other qualities made him a remarkable man.
Unhappily for himself and his endowments, which would have enabled him to win a respectable position in an honest career, appear to have been singularly fitted for the life he chose to follow.
Although he has been charged with many offences he never committed, it may be safely believed that during the thirty years or so he was preying upon the public he has done an enormous amount of mischief.
A poet is said to be one in ten thousand. A man of the special capacity of Peace is far more rare.
He seems like the conquerors, and produces on his fellow-men the same sort of hope that he may be the last of his class.
Probably there is not another man in England who could have run the race of this criminal—by night a thief and a murderer; by day a citizen of credit, who went abroad without fear in the busy haunts of men.
The miserable failure he had made in attempting to rob the house of which Gatliffe was the custodian did not abash him.
He was to be seen in places of public resort at Sheffield on the following day.
Indeed, he mixed more freely with the townspeople than he had done heretofore.