text:  A certain rude power a sort of unhealthy energy has enabled the writer to throw an interest round pickpockets and murderers; and if this interest were legitimately produced by the exhibition of human passions modified by the circumstances of the actor--if it arose from the development of one real living thinking doing and suffering man's heart we could only wonder at the author's choice of such a subject but we should be ready to acknowledge that he had widened our sphere of knowledge--and made us feel as we all do without taking the same credit for it to ourselves that the old blockhead in France does that being human we have sympathies with all even the lowest and wickedest of our kind