History of the Buccaneers in America." My edition (of 1810) is a
dumpy little book, in very small type, and quite a crowd of
publishers took part in the venture. The older editions are
difficult to procure if your pockets are not stuffed with pieces-of-
eight. You do not often find even this volume, but "when found make
a note of," and you have a reply to Canon Kingsley.

A charitable old Scotch lady, who heard our ghostly foe evil spoken
of, remarked that, "If we were all as diligent and conscientious as
the Devil, it would be better for us." Now, the buccaneers were
certainly models of diligence and conscientiousness in their own
industry, which was to torture people till they gave up their goods,
and then to run them through the body, and spend the spoils over
drink and dice. Except Dampier, who was a clever man, but a poor
buccaneer (Mr. Clark Russell has written his life), they were the
most hideously ruthless miscreants that ever disgraced the earth and
the sea. But their courage and endurance were no less notable than
their greed and cruelty, so that a moral can be squeezed even out of
these abandoned miscreants. The soldiers and sailors who made their
way within gunshot of Khartoum, overcoming thirst, hunger, heat, the
desert, and the gallant children of the desert, did not fight,
march, and suffer more bravely than the scoundrels who sacked
Mairaibo and burned Panama. Their good qualities were no less
astounding and exemplary than their almost incredible wickedness.
They did not lie about in hammocks much, listening to the landward
wind among the woods--the true buccaneers. To tell the truth, most
of them had no particular cause to love the human species. They
were often Europeans who had been sold into slavery on the West
Indian plantations, where they learned lessons of cruelty by
suffering it. Thus Mr. Joseph Esquemeling, our historian, was