In the first two volumes he has naturally mainly state trials to record; the later volumes record sordid everyday crimes, and here Borrow is more at home.

His style when he rewrites the trials is more vigorous, and his narrative more interesting.

It is to be hoped that the exigent publisher, who he assures us made him buy the books for his compilation out of the L50 that he paid for it, was able to present him with a set of the _State Trials_, if only in one of the earlier and cheaper issues of the work than the one that now has a place in every lawyer's library.[68] 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.