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.
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