Note 3 — LETTER LVIII.

Well, yes—it in merely human probability may. I do verily perceive and admit, in convinced sorrow, that I live in the midst of a nation of thieves and murderers;3 that everybody around me is trying to rob everybody else; and that, not bravely and strongly, but in the most cowardly and loathsome ways of lying trade; that ‘Englishman’ is now merely another word for black-leg and swindler; and English honour and courtesy changed to the sneaking and the smiles of a whipped pedlar, an inarticulate Autolycus, with a steam hurdy-gurdy instead of a voice. Be this all so; be it so to the heart’s content—or liver and gall’s content—of every modern economist and philosopher. I yet do verily trust that out of this festering mass of scum of the earth, and miserable coagulation of frog-spawn soaked in ditch-water, I can here and there pluck up some drowned honour by the locks, and leave written orders for wholesome deed, and collected monies for the doing thereof, which will be obeyed and guarded after I am gone; and will by no means fall into the power of the mendicant tribe who, too cowardly and heartless to beg from the face of the living, steal the alms of the dead, and unite the apparently inconsistent characters of beggar and thief, seasoning the compound with sacrilege.