Other editions of book Paul Clifford; Volume 3

'It was a dark and stormy night ...'Paul Clifford leads a double life. By day he is a fashionable man about town, the toast of genteel society. By night, he is 'Captain Lovett', a dashing masked highwayman, robbing unsuspecting travellers on moonlit roads with his band of fellow brigands. When Clifford falls in love with the beautiful, auburn-haired Lucy, the daughter of a wealthy squire, he wonders if he should abandon his life of vice. But there are many obstacles in his path: his sly love rival Lord Mauleverer, dark secrets from the past, and the threat of the hangman's noose ...

'It was a dark and stormy night ...' Paul Clifford leads a double life. By day he is a fashionable man about town, the toast of genteel society. By night, he is 'Captain Lovett', a dashing masked highwayman, robbing unsuspecting travellers on moonlit roads with his band of fellow brigands. When Clifford falls in love with the beautiful, auburn-haired Lucy, the daughter of a wealthy squire, he wonders if he should abandon his life of vice. But there are many obstacles in his path: his sly love rival Lord Mauleverer, dark secrets from the past, and the threat of the hangman's noose ...

From PELHAM to the PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE, from RIENZI to the LAST DAYS OF POMPEII, -- PAUL CLIFFORD is the only one in which a robber has been made the hero, or the peculiar phases of life which he illustrates have been brought into any prominent description. Without pausing to inquire what realm of manners or what order of crime and sorrow is open to art, and capable of administering to the proper ends of fiction, I may be permitted to observe that the present subject was selected, and the Novel written, with a twofold object: First, to draw attention to two errors in our penal institutions; namely, a vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code, -- the habit of corrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, and then hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of getting rid of our own blunders. Between the example of crime which the tyro learns from the felons in the prison-yard, and the horrible levity with which the mob gather round the drop at Newgate, there is a connection which a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier regions of imagination to trace and to detect. So far this book is less a picture of the king's highway than the law's royal road to the gallows, -- a satire on the short cut established between the House of Correction and the Condemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the novel of PAUL CLIFFORD (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the other.

Say, ye oppressed by some fantastic woes, Some jarring nerve that baffles your repose, Who press the downy couch while slaves advance With timid eye to read the distant glance, Who with sad prayers the weary doctor tease To name the nameless, ever-new disease, Who with mock patience dire complaints endure, Which real pain and that alone can cure, How would you bear in real pain to lie Despised, neglected, left alone to die? How would you bear to draw your latest breath Where all that's wretched paves the way to death?—Crabbe.

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