Sharpe's Magazine.
THE SELECTOR;
AND
LITERARY NOTICES OF
NEW WORKS.
VIDOCQ.
Some very pleasant blunderer is said to have declared Moore's Life of Sheridan to be the best piece of Autobiography he had ever read; and with little more propriety can the concluding volume of Vidocq's Memoirs be said to belong to that species of literature styled Autobiography. The early volumes, however, possessed this feature, but the present is little more than a criminal supplement to the Memoirs. Of this defect, the translator seems to be aware; for in his "Sequel," he says, instead of the important disclosures promised by the Police Agent, in vol. ii., "he has given us a nomenclature of the assassins, thieves, and swindlers of France, and no more." He has merely brought down his Memoirs to the year 1816, and eked out his fourth volume with anecdotes and counsels, which have in most cases, more interest than novelty to recommend them. Still they are worth reading, although of a different character to the scenes, or as a wag would say, the "concerted pieces" which we have quoted from the three previous volumes. Our present quotations will not therefore possess the interest of complicated schemes.
At page 34, Vidocq awards to our metropolis, no very desirable distinction—
Town and Country Thieves.
"No capital in the world, London excepted, has within it so many thieves as Paris. The pavement of the modern Lutetia is incessantly trodden by rogues. It is not surprising; for the facility of hiding them in the crowd makes all that are badly disposed resort thither, whether French or foreign. The greater number are fixed constantly in this vast city; some only come like birds of passage, at the approach of great occasions, or during the summer season. Besides these exotics, there are indigenous plants, which make a fraction in the population, of which the denominator is tolerably high. I leave to the great calculator, M. Charles Dupin, the task of enumerating them in decimals, and telling us if the sum that it amounts to should not be taken into consideration in the application of the black list."