Of all my occupations at this period I am free to confess I liked that of compiling the Newgate Lives and Trials the best; that is, after I had surmounted a kind of prejudice which I originally entertained.  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 Foxe’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 everything a dream—­a