The Beloved Sinner by Agnes Repplier

All the world does not love a lover. It is a cultivated taste, alien to the natural man, and unknown to childhood. But all the world does love a sinner, either because he is convertible to a saint, or because a taste for law-breaking is an inheritance from our first parents, who broke the one and only law imposed upon them. The little children whom Fra Lippo Lippi sees standing in a "row of admiration" around the murderer on the altar step express their innocent interest in crime. Bayard, "sans peur et sans reproche," has never stirred the heart of youth as has Robin Hood, that bold outlaw who "beat and bound" unpopular sheriffs, and "readjusted the distribution of property," -- delightful phrase, as old as the world, and as fresh as to-morrow morning. The terrible and undeserved epithet, "blameless," has robbed great Arthur of his just meed of homage. The "Master Thief" enjoyed, and still enjoys, unmerited popularity.

I sometimes wonder what a man conscious of talent, like the Master Thief, would have thought if the simple criminologists of his day -- who knew no subtler remedy than hanging -- had confronted him with clinics, and laboratories, and pamphlets on the "disease of crime. " I sometimes wonder how his able descendants, like the humorous rogues who stole the gold cup at Ascot; or the wag who slipped the stolen purses (emptied of their contents) into the pocket of the Bishop of Lincoln; or the redoubtable Raymond -- alias Wirth -- who stole a shipping of Kimberley diamonds and a Gainsborough portrait, feel about their pathological needs. "The criminal is a sick man, the prison is his hospital, and the judge who sentenced him is his physician," said Dr. Vaughan, dean of the Medical School in the University of Michigan. "Does a hunting man give up riding to hounds because he has had a fall? " asked a stalwart "invalid," serving a sentence for burglary, of the chaplain who had urged upon him the security of an honest life.