As I gazed on passages like this, and there were many nearly as good in the Newgate lives, I often sighed that it was not my fortune to have to render these lives into German rather than the publisher's philosophy--his tale of an apple and pear.
Mine was an ill-regulated mind at this period.

As I read over the lives of these robbers and pickpockets, strange doubts began to arise in my mind about virtue and crime.

Years before, when quite a boy, as in one of the early chapters I have hinted, I had been a necessitarian; I had even written an essay on crime (I have it now before me, penned in a round boyish hand), in which I attempted to prove that there is no such thing as crime or virtue, all our actions being the result of circumstances or necessity.

These doubts were now again reviving in my mind; I could not, for the life of me, imagine how, taking all circumstances into consideration, these highwaymen, these pickpockets, should have been anything else than highwaymen and pickpockets; any more than how, taking all circumstances into consideration, Bishop Latimer (the reader is aware that I had read Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_) should have been anything else than Bishop Latimer.

I had a very ill-regulated mind at that period.
My own peculiar ideas with respect to everything being a lying dream began also to revive.