POLICE OFFICES AND POLICE REPORTS.
The police reports are frequently the most amusing part of the daily press: they let the reader into many of the secrets of low, and, now and then, of high life; they are redolent of the phraseology of the vulgar; they often tickle our fancies by their humour, and sometimes touch our sympathies by their pathos. As anecdotes of real life; daily catalogues of droll and dismal occurrences among our fellow-citizens; pictures of what is passing in the streets while we, who are sober sort of folks, are dreaming in our beds; sketches of manners, and records of the habits, feelings, and minor as well as major delinquencies of those who breathe the same air with us; they could not fail to be interesting to us all, were we not aware that, like the novels which are said to be "founded on fact," their most rich and racy parts are frequently fiction.
Let not the non-gnostic portion of our readers imagine, that if they haunt the justice-seat of Birnie and his judicial co-mates, that they will ever witness such pleasant, sparkling, humorous examinations as those reported in the columns of the papers which matinally grace their breakfast-tables. The tyro upon town will stare at this. Why, will he say, cannot I, if I frequent the same place, see and hear what those who are employed for the press see and hear there? He can; but the fact is, that our police reporters are by far too clever to set down the words of other people, without throwing in something of their own. Their plan is to drop the duller parts of a story or a speech, and to embellish its livelier portion—to select the tit-bits, and sauce and spice them up sufficiently high to please the palates of the news-reading public. The offices afford them an excellent variety of characters, which, like skilful dramatists, they work up until they become really humorous: many of the cases afford them capital plots, into which they cleverly dovetail pleasant little episodes, and adhere no closer to the deposed facts than many of our by-gone playwrights have done to the sacred page of history. We allude only to the cases of humour which occur at the police-offices: those reports which can be interesting only in proportion as they are correct, are, in general, accurately given; but the matrimonial squabbles, the Irish farçettas, and the frays between the Dogberrys of the night and late walkers—albeit they may, peradventure, contain the leading facts disclosed—are highly wrought up by the fanciful powers of those who cause the public and feed themselves at a per-line-age for the daily press. Many cases which, on hearing, are dull and oftentimes disgusting, under the magic pens of the police-office scribes become lively and entertaining; they are furnished with the raw material—the metal in its ore—which they purify and polish, until it bears little or no resemblance to what it was before it underwent the process of manufacturing for the paper-market under their skilful hands. There are many who delight to visit the police-offices for the sake of seeing those beings who appear there, of whom others only read: some of our readers may, perhaps, be bitten with a similar fancy; but, we warrant, that they will find the actual doings at Bow-street very different to what they had imagined; as Charles Mathews' Sir Harry Skelton says, "There's nothing at all in it; people talk a great deal about it—but there's nothing in it, after all—nothing."
It is not often that we look in at morning or evening sitting of the magistrates; we are content to have the police reports served up to us with our potted beef and buttered toast at breakfast; we enjoy them, although we feel convinced that many of them bear no more resemblance to the affairs they are founded on, than mock-turtle to calf's-head; still, like the soup, they are by far the most pleasant and palatable of the two.—Every Night Book.