ple 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
hours at my occupations, I would fling myself back on my chair, look
about the poor apartment, dimly lighted by an unsnuffed candle, or upon
the heaps of books and papers before me, and exclaim,--"Do I exist? Do
these things, which I think I see about me, exist, or do they not? Is
not every thing a dream--a deceitful dream? Is not this apartment a
dream--the furniture a dream? The publisher a dream--his philosophy a
dream? Am I not myself a dream--dreaming about translating a dream? I
can't see why all should not be a dream; what's the use of the reality?"
And then I would pinch myself, and snuff the burdened smoky light. "I
can't see, for the life of me, the use of all this; therefore why should
I think that it exists? If there was a chance, a probability of all this
tending to anything, I might believe; but--" and then I would stare and
think, and after some time shake my head and return again to my
occupations for an hour or two; and then I would perhaps shake, and
shiver, and yawn, and look wistfully in the direction of my sleeping
apartment; and then, but not wistfully, at the papers and books before
me; and sometimes I would return to my papers and books; but oftener I
would arise, and, after another yawn and shiver, take my light, and
proceed to my sleeping chamber.

T