In Castaing much ingenuity is shown in the conception of the
crime, but the man is weak and timid; he is not the stuff of
which the great criminal is made; Holmes is cast in the true
mould of the instinctive murderer. Castaing is a man of
sensibility, capable of domestic affection; Holmes completely
insensible to all feelings of humanity. Taking life is a mere
incident in the accomplishment of his schemes; men, women and
children are sacrificed with equal mercilessness to the necessary
end. A consummate liar and hypocrite, he has that strange power
of fascination over others, women in particular, which is often
independent altogether of moral or even physical attractiveness.
We are accustomed to look for a certain vastness, grandeur of
scale in the achievements of America. A study of American crime
will show that it does not disappoint us in this expectation.
The extent and audacity of the crimes of Holmes are proof of it.

To find a counterpart in imaginative literature to the complete
criminal of the Holmes type we must turn to the pages of
Shakespeare. In the number of his victims, the cruelty and
insensibility with which he attains his ends, his unblushing
hypocrisy, the fascination he can exercise at will over others,
the Richard III. of Shakespeare shows how clearly the poet
understood the instinctive criminal of real life. The Richard of
history was no doubt less instinctively and deliberately an
assassin than the Richard of Shakespeare. In the former we can
trace the gradual temptation to crime to which circumstances
provoke him. The murder of the Princes, if, as one writer
contends, it was not the work of Henry VII.--in which case that
monarch deserves to be hailed as one of the most consummate