All the poetry which I reviewed appeared to be published at the
expense of the authors. If I am asked how I comported myself, under all
circumstances, as a reviewer--I answer--I did not forget that I was
connected with a review established on Oxford principles, the editor of
which had translated Quintilian. All the publications which fell under
my notice I treated in a gentlemanly and Oxford-like manner, no
personalities--no vituperation--no shabby insinuations; decorum, decorum
was the order of the day. Occasionally a word of admonition, but gently
expressed, as an Oxford undergraduate might have expressed it, or master
of arts. How the authors whose publications were consigned to my
colleagues were treated by them I know not; I suppose they were treated
in an urbane and Oxford-like manner, but I cannot say; I did not read the
reviewals of my colleagues, I did not read my own after they were
printed. I did not like reviewing.

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 ap