Good resolutions and moral exhortations are not uncommon:--
"It's no good crying, you have got to do it, then after you have done it don't do it any more; I wont."
"Brethren in adversity, turn your heart to God and be happy."
"1/2 pint whisky brought me here--took the pledge for 2 years--renewable for ever."
"The Almighty for master, the devil for servant. Amen."
"Fear God and scorn the Devil, then you will not be here again."
The Italian inscriptions supply a more dubious exhortation:--
"O thieves! our profession is ruined by those rascally judges. But courage! Forward!"
This brief account would not be complete if I neglected to give some specimens of the imprecations, crude erotic aspirations, and perverse instincts which occupy some considerable space in Lombroso's collection. I will leave them untranslated:--
"Abbasso il direttore delle carcere e il capo-guardia, che sono due avanzi di galera. A morte le gafe [warders] e tutti le spie, a morte il capo-guardiano delle carcere, a morte l'Arca che sono la rovina di tanti giovani."
"Mia adorata stella, quando potrô ch...?"
"Pensare che in questo stesso luogo vi sono tante bighe [women] che hanno volontà di farsi infilzare e non possono e tanti p... che infilzerebbero un cane altro che una f... e non possono farlo."
"Pare impossible. Che si possa stare tanto tempo senza piantare il membro in una f... od in un culo. Eppure sono già 22 mesi che me lo meno due volte ogni quattro giorno e non sono ancora tisico."
The last I will give was written by a woman in a religious book, and is translated by Lombroso from the Piedmontese dialect--
"La Marietta del taglio salute le sue amiche che fanno la porca come lei, e saluta tutti i giovanotti che l'hanno ch... Menatevi una volta l'uccello al mio gusto, che io me la meno al vostro, e quando sarô libera venite a trovarmi che ce l'ho sempra calda e stretta tanto che volete. Allegri!"
M. Joly has made some interesting investigations (which he has recorded recently in the _Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle_) concerning the favourite reading of French prisoners. He found that such criminals do not read either Molière or Voltaire. Nor do they care for the psychological novel of character and analysis; they have no taste and no capacity for introspection; they prefer the _rococo_ style, and an old romance in five or six volumes called _Épreuves du Sentiment_ is a great favourite at La Grande Roquette. This is what we should expect from that sentimentalism which has already been noted. But among the favourite prison novelists Alexandre Dumas is _facile princeps_. We must not seek to explain this by finding in Dumas a response to specific criminal instincts. In this matter prisoners are at one with a very large body of non-prisoners, with George Sand, Tolstoï, and Rossetti at their head. It is the universally human quality in the prolific novelist, the anodyne of his entrancing and unflagging interest, the satisfaction which he offers to the love of adventure, by which Dumas fetters the criminal as well as the man of genius. The female prisoners at Saint Lazare, unlike the male prisoners, are constantly asking for Voltaire's books, which, however, the sisters are not able to supply. They are very fond of Henri Conscience, the Flemish Walter Scott, a preference which is also by no means shared by the men, and they delight in all sorts of innocent and sentimental love-stories, although their marginal annotations to these do not always admit of reproduction.