His vanity and his laziness were alike invincible.  He believed himself a miracle of learning as well as a perfect thief, and physical toil was the sole ‘lay’ for which he professed no capacity.  For a while he corrected the press for a printer, and he roundly asserts that his knowledge of literature and of foreign tongues rendered him invaluable.  It was vanity again that induced him to assert his innocence when he was lagged for so vulgar a crime as stealing a wipe from a tradesman in Chancery Lane.  At the moment of arrest he was on his way to purchase base coin from a Whitechapel bit-faker:  but, despite his nefarious errand, he is righteously wrathful at what he asserts was an unjust conviction, and henceforth he assumed the crown of martyrdom.  His first and last ambition during the intervals of freedom was gentility, and so long as he was not at work he lived the life of a respectable grocer.  Although the casual Cyprian flits across his page, he pursued the one flame of his life for the good motive, and he affects to be a very model of domesticity.  The sentiment of piety also was strong upon him, and if he did not, like the illustrious Peace, pray for his jailer, he rivalled the Prison Ordinary in comforting the condemned.  Had it only been his fate to die on the gallows, how unctuous had been his croak!

The text of his ‘Memoirs’ having been edited, it is scarce possible to define his literary talent.  The book, as it stands, is an excellent piece of narrative, but it loses somewhat by the pretence of style.  The man’s invulnerable conceit prevented an absolute frankness, and there is little enough hilarity to correct the acid sentiment and the intolerable vows of repentance.  Again, though he knows his subject, and can patter flash with the best, his incorrigible respectability leads him to ape the manner of a Grub Street hack, and to banish to a vocabulary those pearls of slang which might have added vigour and lustre to his somewhat tiresome page.  However, the thief cannot escape his inevitable defects.  The vanity, the weakness, the sentimentality of those who are born beasts of prey, yet have the faculty of depredation only half-developed, are the foes of truth, and it is well to remember that the autobiography of a rascal is tainted at its source.  A congenial pickpocket, equipped with the self-knowledge and the candour which would enable him to recognise himself an outlaw and justice his enemy rather than an instrument of malice, would prove a Napoleon rather than a Vaux.  So that we must e’en accept our Newgate Calendar with its many faults upon its head, and be content.  For it takes a man of genius to write a book, and the thief who turns author commonly inhabits a paradise of the second-rate.

GEORGE BARRINGTON