The
trials were entertaining enough; but the lives--how full were they of
wild and racy adventures, and in what racy, genuine language were they
told. What struck me most with respect to these lives was the art which
the writers, whoever they were, possessed of telling a plain story. It
is no easy thing to tell a story plainly and distinctly by mouth; but to
tell one on paper is difficult indeed, so many snares lie in the way.
People are afraid to put down what is common on paper, they seek to
embellish their narratives, as they think, by philosophic speculations
and reflections; they are anxious to shine, and people who are anxious to
shine can never tell a plain story. "So I went with them to a music
booth, where they made me almost drunk with gin, and began to talk their
flash language, which I did not understand," says, or is made to say,
Henry Simms, executed at Tyburn some seventy years before the time of
which I am speaking. I have always looked upon this sentence as a
masterpiece of the narrative style, it is so concise and yet so very
clear. As I gazed on passages like this, and there were many nearly as
good in the _Newgate Lives_, I often sighed that it was not my fortune to
have to render these lives into German rather than the publisher's
philosophy--his tale of an apple and pear.

Mine was an ill-regulated mind at this period. As I read over the lives
of these robbers and pickpockets, strange doubts began to arise in my
mind about virtue and crime. Years before, when quite a boy, as in one
of the early chapters I have hinted, I had been a necessitarian; I had
even written an essay on crime (I have it now before me, penned in a
round, boyish hand), in which I attempted to prove that there is no such
thing as crime or virtue, all our actions being the result of
circumstances or necessity. These doubts were now again reviving in my
mind; I could not for the life of me imagine how, taking all
circumstances into consideration, these highwaymen, these pickpockets,
should have been anything else than highwaymen and pickpockets; any more
than how, taking all circumstances into consideration, Bishop Latimer
(the reader is aware that I had read Fox's _Book of Martyrs_) should have
been anything else than Bishop Latimer. I had a very ill-regulated mind
at that period.

My own peculiar ideas with respect to everything being a lying dream
began also to revive. Sometimes at midnight, after having toiled for