G.W.

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THE SELECTOR AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS

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MEMOIRS OF VIDOCQ.

The French Thief-taker

This is as full-charged a portrait of human depravity as the gloomiest misanthrope could wish for.  But it has much wider claims on public attention than the gratification of the misanthropic few who mope in corners or stalk up and down leafless and almost solitary walks during this hanging and drowning season.  Nevertheless, all men are more or less misanthropes, or they affect to be so; for only skim off the bile of a true critic, or the minds of the hundred thousand who read newspapers, and look first for the bankrupts and deaths.  Sugar and wormwood and wormwood and sugar are the standing dishes, but as we read the other day, “there is a certain hankering for the gloomy side of nature, whence the trials and convictions of vice become so much more attractive than the brightest successes of virtue.”  People with macadamized minds, and their histories (scarce as the originals are) are mere nonentities, and food for the trunk-maker; whereas a book of hair-breadth escapes, thrilling with horror and romantic narrative will tempt people to sit up reading in their beds, till like Rousseau, they are reminded of morning by the stone-chatters at their window.  To the last class belong the Memoirs of Vidocq, an analysis of which would be “utterly impossible, so powerful are the descriptions, and so continuous the thread of their history.”  The original work was published a short time since in Paris, and republished here; but, we believe the present is the first translation that has appeared in England.  The newspapers have, from time to time, translated a few extracts, when their Old Bailey news was at a stand, so that the name of Vidocq must be somewhat familiar to many of our readers.[11]

    [11] The present portion is only the first volume.  The Memoirs are
        to be completed in four volumes, to form part of the series of
        Autobiographical Memoirs, published by Messrs. Hunt and Clarke,
        and decidedly one of the most attractive works that that has
        lately issued from the press.  As we intend to notice this
        collection at some future time, we can only, for the present,
        spare room for this direction of the reader’s attention—­for
        the design deserves well of the public; and if the success be
        proportioned fro its merits, it will be great indeed.