ROMANCE OF RASCALITY.

THAT this is a great world is a maxim forced upon the attention by the moral aspect of every-day events. It is especially apparent, when we consider the room it affords for the operations of knaves. The great brotherhood of rogues, who live by cheating and corrupting the species, now occupy some of the most important posts in society, science, and letters, and, as missionaries of the devil, are threading every avenue to the heart and brain of the community. Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention. One of its latest and most influential is the Romance of Rascality. To a man who knows what it is to have his pocket picked, or a knife insinuated into his ribs, there may appear little that is romantic in the operation; but to a large and increasing portion of society it is otherwise. Thieves and cut-throats have come to be considered the most important and interesting of men, and virtuous mediocrity to be valuable only as affording them subjects for experiment. There is a certain piquant shamelessness, a peculiarly ingenious dishonesty, in some of the forms of literary chicane, which nothing can equal in impudence; for it is practically assumed that the final cause of human society is the provision of a brilliant theatre for the exploits of its outcasts.

At one time, it was considered settled that the domain of ideality was closed to vulgar criminals, and tha

footpads and windpipe-slitters had no pretensions to the honors of romance. For persons to act as heroes of stirring adventures and lovers of beautiful women, the novelist was compelled to rely on gentlemen, who did nothing in the way of theft and murder which the "moral sense of the world did not approve. If he introduced characters who carried matters with a high hand, he availed himself of respectable generals and statesmen, men who might ruin an empire, but who would not condescend to relieve a traveller of his purse or his brains. In all cases he never selected his heroes and heroines from the common herd of profligates and criminals, or sought eminence by perching himself on the gallows. But now it appears that the old class of romancers were deficient in comprehension. It has been discovered that everything in nature and life has its poetic side; that it is foreign to the spirit of the age for the Republic of Letters to tolerate any of that aristocratic exclusiveness which refuses the name of hero to the inmate of the jail and the occupant of the gibbet. Rascality is now the rage, and asserts its existence with an emphasis. It has forced the passages leading to the temple of fame, and breaks into literature as it was wont to break into houses. Things heretofore considered incapable of apology or adornment, the fixed facts of guilt and crime, which charity itself doomed to infamy or oblivion, are now thrust into our faces, candied over with panegyric, and challenging our respect. The thief and the cut-purse, the murderer and the incendiary, strut and swagger in the sunny land of romance. a saturnalia of complacent blackguardism and vulgar villany, tricked out in the cast-off frippery of Sir Charles Grandison and Thaddeus of Warsaw. It is Satan grown

It is

sentimental, and covering his cloven foot in a satin slipAnd from the whole comes a complex fragrance, made up of sulphur and lavender, hot pitch and eau de Cologne.

According to the philosophy obtaining among the romancers of rascality, the fact that an object creates physical disgust is the reason why we should take it to our arms; the fact that a man excites moral reprobation is his claim upon our sympathy. That the world is sadly out of order, is proved from the fact that all the wise men are shut up in insane asylums, and all the heroes are clanking fetters or pounding stone in prisons. The real virtue of society is to be found in the victims of "social arrangements ;" and the true objects of love are those whom the law hates and persecutes. What we call law and order, are other names for injustice and oppression. Sin is a word by which bigots express their dislike of great souls and free opinions.

Again, these gentlemen are champions for what they are pleased to call nature, both in thought and conduct. They desire to have this nature presented in its proper nudity, arrayed in no conventional robes, shining with no rhetorical varnish. The taste which would dictate discrimination in the selection of objects for romantic treatment, and respect the natural relations of things, they spurn at as effeminate. It must be conceded that they have brought round a large number of readers to their views. Let an author's brain teem with monsters, and his progeny are soon cradled in the bosom, or dandled in the arms, of an "enlightened" public. Let him pile horror upon horror, revel in the description of stale enormities, draw aside the "decent drapery" which covers the nakedness of depravity, and have a pool of

blood running and glistening through his compositions, and there are people who will throw up their caps in admiration of his "power," and be voluble in praise of his "insight." A literary reputation may thus be acquired by a judicious mixture of horror and stupidity, and afford, likewise, a fine medium through which all the rogues of the nation may communicate with all the gulls. That the simple and the foolish should be victimized by the knowing, is the notion which a romancer of rascality entertains of preëstablished harmony and the fitness of things.

The great compensation for all the evil which this kind of literature produces is found in the fact that it is cheap. The cheapness must be acknowledged. By the progress of science and improvement, the most economical or miserly of beings is enabled to gratify his taste for mental degradation, and his penchant for moral ruin, at the extremely low price of ninepence. Who will not commit suicide, when poison is cheap? What keeps people from blowing out their brains, but the high price of pistols? Formerly, it seems, self-destruction was a luxury to be enjoyed only by the rich, but now it is placed within the means of the humblest. Formerly, blasphemy was held at high rates, and few could indulge in scoffing but the purchaser of Voltaire and D'Holbach; now this elegant recreation of pride can be bought for a penny. That great doctrine of equality, for which certain old gentlemen in '76 perilled their honor, lives, and fortunes, has, it seems, been imperfectly understood until the present favored age. They fought for an equality in evil as well as good. They poured out their blood, that the people might have perdition and death at low prices. They fought against monopolies in stupidity, blasphemy,

immorality, and damnation. Their most resounding declamation thundered against the enormity of allowing the rich precedence in catching at the delectable baits of sin, and not giving the poor man an opportunity of having Satan's hook fast fixed in his own bleeding gills. They wished to elevate the laboring classes, but it was by allowing them a fair competition with the lazy classes, in the great object of getting hanged. The force of this argument for cheap wretchedness and ruin will depend much on the natural disposition of those to whom it is addressed. Some men, doubtless, have a theory of human life, in which happiness is synonymous with lowness, and a journey on the road to ruin is considered a performance of the whole duty of man. On such a road it is important to have cheap fares, in order to increase the travel.

It may be objected, by the patrons of this cheap Romance of Rascality, that criminals appear in legitimate romance as much as they do in rascally romance, and that it is unfair to stigmatize their department of fiction as preeminently wicked. It must be confessed that a line of distinction should here be drawn between romances which have villanous characters, and romances of which villany is the characteristic. A dramatist, poet, or romancer, is doubtless to accommodate his creations to the truth of things. His fictions should have a basis of reality, and present a true exhibition of life, actual or possible. Now, it is unfortunately true, that no exhibition of life can be accurate, unless it exhibits a large portion of rascality; for rascality is an important element of life. The romancer, perhaps, might be justified in making most of his characters more or less wicked, without running the risk of having his production condemned