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 highway robbery, diversified by an occasional murder, that, with the finisher of the law's assistance, he had ended his exploits in what the slang of his class called "a breakfast of hartichoke with caper sauce." How hateful the phrase! But it was one of many such popularly current in those days. The author of my "Thieves' Anthology" was described in my paper as a well-born man of good education, who, having ruined himself by his bad habits, had fallen into the criminal ranks, but had not forgotten the _literae humaniores_ which he had learned at the Heidelberg University. Of the purpose with which he had written he spoke thus in what I described as the fragments of a preface to his Miscellany:-- "To rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many recent authors of distinction. How they have succeeded, let the populous state of the public jails attest. The office of 'dubsman' [hangman] has ceased to be a sinecure, and the public and Mr Joseph Hume have the satisfaction of knowing that these useful functionaries have now got something to do for their salaries. The number of their pupils has increased, is increasing, and is not likely to be diminished. But much remains to be done. Many an untenanted cell still echoes only to the sighs of its own loneliness. New jails are rising around us, which require to be filled. The Penitentiary presently erecting at Perth is of the most commodious description.