A VERY GOOD BOOK 001
A VERY GOOD BOOK 001
There are other manifestations of greatness than to relieve suffering or to wreck an empire. How shall you contemplate with indifference the career of an artist whom genius or good guidance has compelled to exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer aptitudes? A masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the reprobation of the moralist. The scoundrel, when once justice is quit of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by their effect;
It was not until avarice had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of wealth, until civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable property, that thieving became a liberal and an elegant profession.True, in pastoral society, the lawless
man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the barrier between robbery and warfare.
Even the adventurer upon the road threatened his victim with a bludgeon, nor was it until the breath of the Renaissance had vivified the world that a gentleman and an artist could face the traveller with a courteous demand for his purse.But the age which witnessed the enterprise of Drake and the triumph of Shakespeare knew also the prowess
of the highwayman and the dexterity of the cutpurse. Though the art displayed all the freshness and curiosity of the primitives, still it was art.With Gamaliel Ratsey, who demanded a scene from Hamlet of a rifled.