The second category includes offenders quite removed from the ordinary criminal classes. Several of these, impulsive murderers, reprieved from the gallows, were pointed out to me at Portland last summer, and one I remembered in particular—a handsome, well-set man, not yet middle-aged, trudging along under a warder's eye round and round the infirmary yard, who had been seventeen years in confinement. The impenitent of this order is such an egoistic maniac as Wainwright, who, the night before his death, paced the yard of Newgate with the governor, smoking a cigar, and recounting his successes with women; or he is a criminal of the great sort, strong in mind as in body, the fearless disciple of a dreadful philosophy of his own, which lets him face death as boldly as he inflicts it, and which, at the last, inspires him only with a hatred of the law that has vanquished him. Poulmann was a criminal of this type; an ultra-sanguine temperament, an athletic form, a constitution physically and morally energetic, an Herculean force of body, and a pride which the _cachot du Condamné_ could not reduce. "It shall never be said that Poulmann changed!" was his first and last confession. A "monstrous atheist," he admitted that he had prayed for the woman who was condemned with him: "But there can be no God, since Louise also is to die." Abbé Touzè suggested that the last days of Louise might be embittered by his impenitence. This shook him for a moment, but he returned to himself: "No! Poulmann will never change." But, alike for the weak-hearted, the indifferent, and the valiant, the way to the scaffold is rendered in these days as easy as may be. Victor Hugo's condemned man in the old, abhorred Bicêtre was turned out by day among the _forçats_ awaiting their despatch to the _bagne_; they made sport of him, and ghastly jokes about the "widow" or guillotine—time-honoured amongst the criminal classes—were pointed afresh for his benefit. His treatment at the hands of the prison officers was scarcely less callous; no one had a thought or cared that this poor wight was biding the morning when he should be rudely severed from all the living. The position of convicts cast for death in the Newgate of the early years of this century was every jot as cruel. It was thus under the old order; it is more commendable to-day. The tenant of the condemned cell, withdrawn from the stare of the world, is surrounded by people who have no desire but to soften the few days or weeks that remain to him. He is no longer on view at a price. He has not, like Lacenaire, the privilege of refusing the visits of duchesses, nor the indignity to endure of being exposed at a few francs per head to the indecent gaze of sensation-mongers. In La Roquette nowadays no one can admire or contemn him until he shuffles out to meet his fate just beyond the prison door.