“Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!”

   which travelled everywhere, and made the patter of thieves and burglars “familiar in our mouths as household words.” It deafened us in the streets, where it was as popular with the organ-grinders and German bands as Sullivan’s brightest melodies ever were in a later day. It clanged at midday from the

   steeple of St Giles, the Edinburgh cathedral;

    [ix]

   it was whistled by every dirty “gutter-snipe,” and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips, that, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang, proclaimed to their admiring friends—

     “In a box of the stone jug I was born,

     Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn;

     My noble father, as I’ve heard say,

     Was a famous marchant of capers gay;”

   ending with the inevitable and insufferable chorus,

     “Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!”

   Soon after the Newgate Calendar was appealed to for a hero by the author of ‘Pelham,’ who had already won no small distinction, and who in his ‘Paul Clifford’ did his best to throw a halo of romance around the highwayman’s career. Not satisfied with this, Bulwer next claimed the sympathies of his readers for Eugene Aram, and exalted a very common type of murderer into a nobly minded and highly sentimental scholar. Crime and criminals became the favourite theme of a

   multitude of novelists of a lower class. They even formed the central interest of the ‘Oliver Twist’ of Charles Dickens, whose Fagin and his pupil “the Artful Dodger,” Bill Sykes and Nancy, were simultaneously presented to us in their habits as they lived by the genius of George Cruikshank, with a power that gave a double interest to Dickens’s masterly delineation of these worthies.

   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 

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