the
refrain,

"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"

which travelled everywhere, and made the patter of thieves and burglars
"familiar in our mouths as household words." It deafened us in the
streets, where it was as popular with the organ-grinders and German bands
as Sullivan's brightest melodies ever were in a later day. It clanged at
midday from the steeple of St Giles, the Edinburgh cathedral; {ix} it was
whistled by every dirty "gutter-snipe," and chanted in drawing-rooms by
fair lips, that, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang,
proclaimed to their admiring friends--

"In a box of the stone jug I was born,
Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn;
My noble father, as I've heard say,
Was a famous marchant of capers gay;"

ending with the inevitable and insufferable chorus,

"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"

Soon after the Newgate Calendar was appealed to for a hero by the author
of 'Pelham,' who had already won no small distinction, and who in his
'Paul Clifford' did his best to throw a halo of romance around the
highwayman's career. Not satisfied with this, Bulwer next claimed the
sympathies of his readers for Eugene Aram, and exalted a very common type
of murderer into a nobly minded and highly sentimental scholar. Crime
and criminals became the favourite theme of a multitude of novelists of a
lower class. They even formed the central interest of the 'Oliver Twist'
of Charles Dickens, whose Fagin and his pupil "the Artful Dodger," Bill
Sykes and Nancy, were simultaneously presented to us in their habits as
they lived by the genius of George Cruikshank, with a power that gave a
double interest to Dickens's masterly delineation of these worthies.

The time seemed--in 1841--to have come to open people's eyes to the
dangerous and degrading taste of the hour, and it struck me that this
might be done by pushing to still further extravagance the praises which
had been lavishly bestowed upon the gentlemen whose career generally
terminated in Newgate or on the Tyburn Tree, and by giving "the
accomplishment of verse" to the sentiments and the language which formed
the staple of the popular thieves' literature of the circulating
libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a manuscript, supposed to
be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own
convictions as to the noble vocation of those who set law at defiance,
and lived by picking pockets, burglary, and high