The third volume of _Celebrated Trials_, although it opens with the trial of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes. I have said that _Faustus_ is an allegory of 'man's inhumanity to man.' That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of _Celebrated Trials_. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, when some roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a dagger, which he usually carried 'to carve fruit and sweetmeats,' and killed his assailant. In that age, when our law courts were a veritable shambles, how cheerful it is to find that the jury returned a verdict of 'self-defence.' But then Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, and David Garrick gave evidence to character, representing Baretti as 'a man of benevolence, sobriety, modesty, and learning.' This trial is an oasis of mercy in a desert of drastic punishment. Borrow carries on his 'trials' to the very year before the date of publication, and the last trial in the book is that of 'Henry Fauntleroy, Esquire,' for forgery. Fauntleroy was a quite respectable banker of unimpeachable character, to whom had fallen at a very early age the charge of a banking business that was fundamentally unsound. It is clear that he had honestly endeavoured to put things on a better footing, that he lived simply, and had no gambling or other vices. At a crisis, however, he forged a document, in other words signed a transfer of stock which he had no right to do, the 'subscribing witness' to his power of attorney being Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and father of the distinguished poet.[69] Well, Fauntleroy was sentenced to be hanged--and he was duly hanged at Newgate on 30th October 1824, only thirteen years before Queen Victoria came to the throne!
Borrow has affirmed that from a study of the _Newgate Calendar_ and the compilation of his _Celebrated Trials_ he first learned to write genuine English, and it is a fact that there are some remarkably dramatic effects in these volumes, although one here withholds from Borrow the title of 'author' because so much is 'scissors and paste,' and the purple passages are only occasional. All the same I am astonished that no one has thought it worth while to make a volume of these dramatic episodes, which are clearly the work of Borrow, and owe nothing to the innumerable pamphlets and chap-books that he brought into use. Take such an episode as that of Schening and Harlin, two young German women, one of whom pretended to have murdered her infant in the presence of the other because she madly supposed that this would secure them bread--and they were starving. The trial, the scene at the execution, the confession on the scaffold of the misguided but innocent girl, the respite, and then the execution--these make up as thrilling a narrative as is contained in the pages of fiction. Assuredly Borrow did not spare himself in that race round the bookstalls of London to find the material which the grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for example, Sir Herbert Croft's volume, _Love and Madness_, the supposed correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft's. Borrow accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of the Hackman trial.