The Bible and the Newgate Calendar—­these twain were George Borrow’s favourite reading, and all save the psychologist and the pedant will applaud the preference.  For the annals of the ‘family’ are distinguished by an epic severity, a fearless directness of speech, which you will hardly match outside the Iliad or the Chronicles of the Kings.  But the Newgate Calendar did not spring ready-made into being:  it is the result of a curious and gradual development.  The chap-books came first, with their bold type, their coarse paper, and their clumsy, characteristic woodcuts—­the chap-books, which none can contemplate without an enchanted sentiment.  Here at last you come upon a literature, which has been read to pieces.  The very rarity of the slim, rough volumes, proves that they have been handed from one greedy reader to another, until the great libraries alone are rich enough to harbour them.  They do not boast the careful elegance of a famous press:  many of them came from the printing-office of a country town:  yet the least has a simplicity and concision, which are unknown in this age of popular fiction.  Even their lack of invention is admirable:  as the same woodcut might be used to represent Guy, Earl of Warwick, or the last highwayman who suffered at Tyburn, so the same enterprise is ascribed with a delightful ingenuousness to all the heroes who rode abroad under the stars to fill their pockets.

The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey delighted England in 1605, and was the example of after ages.  The anecdote of the road was already crystallised, and henceforth the robber was unable to act contrary to the will of the chap-book.  Thus there grew up a folk-lore of thievery:  the very insistence upon the same motive suggests the fairytale, and, as in the legends of every country, there is an identical element which the anthropologists call ‘human’; so in the annals of adventure there is a set of invariable incidents, which are the essence of thievery.  The industrious hacks, to whom we owe the entertainment of the chap-books, being seedy parsons or lawyers’ clerks, were conscious of their literary deficiencies:  they preferred to obey tradition rather than to invent ineptitudes.  So you may trace the same jest, the same intrigue through the unnumbered lives of three centuries.  And if, being a philosopher, you neglect the obvious plagiarism, you may induce from these similarities a cunning theory concerning the uniformity of the human brain.  But the easier explanation is, as always, the more satisfactory; and there is little doubt that in versatility the thief surpassed his historian.