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+Project Gutenberg Etext A Book of Scoundrels, by Charles Whibley
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+A Book of Scoundrels
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+by Charles Whibley
+
+February, 1999  [Etext #1632]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext A Book of Scoundrels, by Charles Whibley
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+
+A BOOK OF SCOUNDRELS
+
+by CHARLES WHIBLEY
+
+
+
+
+To the Greeks FOOLISHNESS
+
+
+
+I desire to thank the Proprietors of the `National
+Observer,' the `New Review,' the `Pall Mall
+Gazette,' and `Macmillan's Magazine,' for
+courteous permission to reprint certain chapters of
+this book.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+INTRODUCTION 
+
+CAPTAIN HIND
+
+MOLL CUTPURSE AND JONATHAN WILD
+     I. MOLL CUTPURSE
+     II. JONATHAN WILD
+     III. A PARALLEL 
+
+RALPH BRISCOE
+
+GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-STRING JACK
+     I. GILDEROY 
+     II. SIXTEEN-STRING JACK
+     III. A PARALLEL
+
+THOMAS PURENEY
+
+SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE
+     I. JACK SHEPPARD
+     II. LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE
+     III. A PARALLEL
+
+VAUX
+
+GEORGE BARRINGTON
+
+THE SWITCHER AND GENTLEMAN HARRY
+     I. THE SWITCHER
+     II. GENTLEMAN HARRY
+     III. A PARALLEL
+
+DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES PEACE
+     I. DEACON BRODIE
+     II. CHARLES PEACE
+     III. A PARALLEL
+
+THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT
+
+MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+There are other manifestations of greatness than to relieve
+suffering or to wreck an empire.  Julius C<ae>sar and John Howard
+are not the only heroes who have smiled upon the world.  In the
+supreme adaptation of means to an end there is a constant
+nobility, for neither ambition nor virtue is the essential of a
+perfect action.  How shall you contemplate with indifference the
+career of an artist whom genius or good guidance has compelled to
+exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer aptitudes?  A
+masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the
+reprobation of the moralist.  The scoundrel, when once justice is
+quit of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by
+their effect; and he dies secure in the knowledge that he is
+commonly more distinguished, if he be less loved, than his
+virtuous contemporaries.
+
+While murder is wellnigh as old as life, property and the pocket
+invented theft, late-born among the arts.  It was not until
+avarice had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of
+wealth, until civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable
+property, that thieving became a liberal and an elegant
+profession.  True, in pastoral society, the lawless man was eager
+to lift cattle, to break down the barrier between robbery and
+warfare.  But the contrast is as sharp between the savagery of
+the ancient reiver and the polished performance of Captain Hind
+as between the daub of the pavement and the perfection of
+Velasquez.
+
+So long as the Gothic spirit governed Europe, expressing itself
+in useless ornament and wanton brutality, the more delicate
+crafts had no hope of exercise.  Even the adventurer upon the
+road threatened his victim with a bludgeon, nor was it until the
+breath of the Renaissance had vivified the world that a gentleman
+and an artist could face the traveller with a courteous demand
+for his purse.  But the age which witnessed the enterprise of
+Drake and the triumph of Shakespeare knew also the prowess of the
+highwayman and the dexterity of the cutpurse.  Though the art
+displayed all the freshness and curiosity of the primitives,
+still it was art.  With Gamaliel Ratsey, who demanded a scene
+from Hamlet of a rifled player, and who could not rob a
+Cambridge scholar without bidding him deliver an oration in a
+wood, theft was already better than a vulgar extortion.  Moll
+Cutpurse, whose intelligence and audacity were never bettered,
+was among the bravest of the Elizabethans.  Her temperament was
+as large and as reckless as Ben Jonson's own.  Neither her tongue
+nor her courage knew the curb of modesty, and she was the
+first to reduce her craft to a set of wise and imperious rules. 
+She it was who discovered the secret of discipline, and who
+insisted that every member of her gang should undertake no other
+enterprise than that for which nature had framed him.  Thus she
+made easy the path for that other hero, of whom you are told that
+his band was made up `of several sorts of wicked artists, of whom
+he made several uses, according as he perceived which way every
+man's particular talent lay.'  This statesman--Thomas Dun was his
+name--drew up for the use of his comrades a stringent and stately
+code, and he was wont to deliver an address to all novices
+concerning the art and mystery of robbing upon the highway. 
+Under auspices so brilliant, thievery could not but flourish, and
+when the Stuarts sat upon the throne it was already lifted above
+the level of questioning experiment.
+
+Every art is shaped by its material, and with the variations of
+its material it must perforce vary.  If the skill of the cutpurse
+compelled the invention of the pocket, it is certain that the
+rare difficulties of the pocket created the miraculous skill of
+those crafty fingers which were destined to empty it.  And as
+increased obstacles are perfection's best incentive, a finer
+cunning grew out of the fresh precaution.  History does not tell
+us who it was that discovered this new continent of roguery. 
+Those there are who give the credit to the valiant Moll Cutpurse;
+but though the Roaring Girl had wit to conceive a thousand
+strange enterprises, she had not the hand to carry them out, and
+the first pickpocket must needs have been a man of action. 
+Moreover, her nickname suggests the more ancient practice, and it
+is wiser to yield the credit to Simon Fletcher, whose praises are
+chanted by the early historians.
+
+Now, Simon, says his biographer, was `looked upon to be the
+greatest artist of his age by all his contemporaries.'  The son
+of a baker in Rosemary Lane, he early deserted his father's oven
+for a life of adventure; and he claims to have been the first
+collector who, stealing the money, yet left the case.  The new
+method was incomparably more subtle than the old: it afforded an
+opportunity of a hitherto unimagined delicacy; the wielders of
+the scissors were aghast at a skill which put their own
+clumsiness to shame, and which to a previous generation would
+have seemed the wildest fantasy.  Yet so strong is habit, that
+even when the picking of pockets was a recognised industry, the
+superfluous scissors still survived, and many a rogue has hanged
+upon the Tree because he attempted with a vulgar implement such
+feats as his unaided forks had far more easily accomplished.
+
+But, despite the innovation of Simon Fletcher, the highway was
+the glory of Elizabeth, the still greater glory of the Stuarts. 
+`The Laced<ae>monians were the only people,' said Horace Walpole,
+`except the English who seem to have put robbery on a right
+foot.'  And the English of the seventeenth century need fear the
+rivalry of no Laced<ae>monian.  They were, indeed, the most
+valiant and graceful robbers that the world has ever known.  The
+Civil War encouraged their profession, and, since many of them
+had fought for their king, a proper hatred of Cromwell sharpened
+their wits.  They were scholars as well as gentlemen; they
+tempered their sport with a merry wit; their avarice alone
+surpassed their courtesy; and they robbed with so perfect a
+regard for the proprieties that it was only the pedant and the
+parliamentarian who resented their interference.
+
+Nor did their princely manner fail of its effect upon their
+victims.  The middle of the seventeenth century was the golden
+age, not only of the robber, but of the robbed.  The game was
+played upon either side with a scrupulous respect for a potent,
+if unwritten, law.  Neither might nor right was permitted to
+control the issue.  A gaily attired, superbly mounted highwayman
+would hold up a coach packed with armed men, and take a purse
+from each, though a vigorous remonstrance might have carried him
+to Tyburn.  But the traveller knew his place: he did what was
+expected of him in the best of tempers.  Who was he that he
+should yield in courtesy to the man in the vizard?  As it was
+monstrous for the one to discharge his pistol, so the other could
+not resist without committing an outrage upon tradition.  One
+wonders what had been the result if some mannerless reformer had
+declined his assailant's invitation and drawn his sword.  Maybe
+the sensitive art might have died under this sharp rebuff.  But
+none save regicides were known to resist, and their resistance
+was never more forcible than a volley of texts.  Thus the High-
+toby-crack swaggered it with insolent gaiety, knowing no worse
+misery than the fear of the Tree, so long as he followed the
+rules of his craft.  But let a touch of brutality disgrace his
+method, and he appealed in vain for sympathy or indulgence.  The
+ruffian, for instance, of whom it is grimly recorded that he
+added a tie-wig to his booty, neither deserved nor received the
+smallest consideration.  Delivered to justice, he speedily met
+the death his vulgarity merited, and the road was taught the
+salutary lesson that wigs were as sacred as trinkets hallowed by
+association.
+
+With the eighteenth century the highway fell upon decline.  No
+doubt in its silver age, the century's beginning, many a
+brilliant deed was done.  Something of the old policy survived,
+and men of spirit still went upon the pad.  But the breadth of
+the ancient style was speedily forgotten; and by the time the
+First George climbed to the throne, robbery was already a sordid
+trade.  Neither side was conscious of its noble obligation.  The
+vulgar audacity of a bullying thief was suitably answered by the
+ungracious, involuntary submission of the terrified traveller. 
+From end to end of England you might hear the cry of `Stand and
+deliver.'  Yet how changed the accent!  The beauty of gesture,
+the deference of carriage, the ready response to a legitimate
+demand--all the qualities of a dignified art were lost for ever. 
+As its professors increased in number, the note of aristocracy,
+once dominant, was silenced.  The meanest rogue, who could
+hire a horse, might cut a contemptible figure on Bagshot Heath,
+and feel no shame at robbing a poor man.  Once--in that Augustan
+age, whose brightest ornament was Captain Hind--it was something
+of a distinction to be decently plundered.  A century later there
+was none so humble but he might be asked to empty his pocket.  In
+brief, the blight of democracy was upon what should have remained
+a refined, secluded art; and nowise is the decay better
+illustrated than in the appreciation of bunglers, whose exploits
+were scarce worth a record.
+
+James Maclaine, for instance, was the hero of his age.  In a
+history of cowards he would deserve the first place, and the
+`Gentleman Highwayman,' as he was pompously styled, enjoyed a
+triumph denied to many a victorious general.  Lord Mountford led
+half White's to do him honour on the day of his arrest.  On the
+first Sunday, which he spent in Newgate, three thousand jostled
+for entrance to his cell, and the poor devil fainted three times
+at the heat caused by the throng of his admirers.  So long as his
+fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not take up his pen
+without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have robbed him
+near Hyde Park.  Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the white
+feather.  Not once was he known to take a purse with his own
+hand, the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses'
+heads while his accomplice spoke with the passengers.  A poltroon
+before his arrest, in Court he whimpered and whinnied for
+mercy; he was carried to the cart pallid and trembling, and not
+even his preposterous finery availed to hearten him at the
+gallows.  Taxed with his timidity, he attempted to excuse himself
+on the inadmissible plea of moral rectitude.  `I have as much
+personal courage in an honourable cause,' he exclaimed in a
+passage of false dignity, `as any man in Britain; but as I knew I
+was committing acts of injustice, so I went to them half loth and
+half consenting; and in that sense I own I am a coward indeed.'
+
+The disingenuousness of this proclamation is as remarkable as its
+hypocrisy.  Well might he brag of his courage in an honourable
+cause, when he knew that he could never be put to the test.  But
+what palliation shall you find for a rogue with so little pride
+in his art, that he exercised it `half loth, half consenting'? 
+It is not in this recreant spirit that masterpieces are achieved,
+and Maclaine had better have stayed in the far Highland parish,
+which bred him, than have attempted to cut a figure in the larger
+world of London.  His famous encounter with Walpole should have
+covered him with disgrace, for it was ignoble at every point; and
+the art was so little understood, that it merely added a leaf to
+his crown of glory.  Now, though Walpole was far too well-bred to
+oppose the demand of an armed stranger, Maclaine, in defiance of
+his craft, discharged his pistol at an innocent head.  True, he
+wrote a letter of apology, and insisted that, had the one pistol-
+shot proved fatal, he had another in reserve for himself.  But
+not even Walpole would have believed him, had not an amiable
+faith given him an opportunity for the answering quip:  `Can I do
+less than say I will be hanged if he is?'
+
+As Maclaine was a coward and no thief, so also he was a snob and
+no gentleman.  His boasted elegance was not more respectable than
+his art.  Fine clothes are the embellishment of a true
+adventurer; they hang ill on the sloping shoulders of a poltroon.
+
+And Maclaine, with all the ostensible weaknesses of his kind,
+would claim regard for the strength that he knew not.  He
+occupied a costly apartment in St. James's Street; his morning
+dress was a crimson damask banjam, a silk shag waistcoat, trimmed
+with lace, black velvet breeches, white silk stockings, and
+yellow morocco slippers; but since his magnificence added no jot
+to his courage, it was rather mean than admirable.  Indeed, his
+whole career was marred by the provincialism of his native manse.
+
+And he was the adored of an intelligent age; he basked a few
+brief weeks in the noonday sun of fashion.
+
+If distinction was not the heritage of the Eighteenth Century,
+its glory is that now and again a giant raised his head above the
+stature of a prevailing rectitude.  The art of verse was lost in
+rhetoric; the noble prose, invented by the Elizabethans, and
+refined under the Stuarts, was whittled away to common sense by
+the admirers of Addison and Steele.  Swift and Johnson, Gibbon
+and Fielding, were apparitions of strength in an amiable,
+ineffective age.  They emerged sudden from the impeccable
+greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast.  So, while
+the highway drifted--drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft
+was illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius.  The
+brilliant achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard
+might have relieved the gloom of the darkest era, and their
+separate masterpieces make some atonement for the environing
+cowardice and stupidity.  Above all, the Eighteenth Century was
+Newgate's golden age; now for the first time and the last were
+the rules and customs of the Jug perfectly understood.  If
+Jonathan the Great was unrivalled in the art of clapping his
+enemies into prison, if Jack the Slip-string was supreme in the
+rarer art of getting himself out, even the meanest criminal of
+his time knew what was expected of him, so long as he wandered
+within the walled yard, or listened to the ministrations of the
+snuff-besmirched Ordinary.  He might show a lamentable lack of
+cleverness in carrying off his booty; he might prove a too easy
+victim to the wiles of the thief-catcher; but he never fell short
+of courage, when asked to sustain the consequences of his crime.
+
+Newgate, compared by one eminent author to a university, by
+another to a ship, was a republic, whose liberty extended only so
+far as its iron door.  While there was no liberty without, there
+was licence within; and if the culprit, who paid for the smallest
+indiscretion with his neck, understood the etiquette of the
+place, he spent his last weeks in an orgie of rollicking
+lawlessness.  He drank, he ate, he diced; he received his
+friends, or chaffed the Ordinary; he attempted, through the well-
+paid cunning of the Clerk, to bribe the jury; and when every
+artifice had failed he went to Tyburn like a man.  If he knew not
+how to live, at least he would show a resentful world how to die.
+
+`In no country,' wrote Sir T. Smith, a distinguished lawyer of
+the time, `do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in
+England'; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of
+their fellows, Wild's victims made a brave show at the gallows. 
+Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness.  They
+understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation. 
+Though hitherto they had chaffed the Ordinary, they now listened
+to his exhortation with at least a semblance of respect; and
+though their last night upon earth might have been devoted to a
+joyous company, they did not withhold their ear from the
+Bellman's Chant.  As twelve o'clock approached--their last
+midnight upon earth--they would interrupt the most spirited
+discourse, they would check the tour of the mellowest bottle to
+listen to the solemn doggerel.  `All you that in the condemn'd
+hole do lie,' groaned the Bellman of St. Sepulchre's in his
+duskiest voice, and they who held revel in the condemned hole
+prayed silence of their friends for the familiar cadences:
+
+
+All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,
+Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die,
+Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,
+That you before th' Almighty must appear.
+Examine well yourselves, in time repent
+That you may not t' eternal flames be sent;
+And when St. Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
+The Lord above have mercy on your souls.
+               Past twelve o'clock!
+
+
+Even if this warning voice struck a momentary terror into their
+offending souls, they were up betimes in the morning, eager to
+pay their final debt.  Their journey from Newgate to Tyburn was a
+triumph, and their vanity was unabashed at the droning menaces of
+the Ordinary.  At one point a chorus of maidens cast wreaths upon
+their way, or pinned nosegays in their coats, that they might not
+face the executioner unadorned.  At the Crown Tavern they quaffed
+their last glass of ale, and told the landlord with many a leer
+and smirk that they would pay him on their way back.  Though
+gravity was asked, it was not always given; but in the Eighteenth
+Century courage was seldom wanting.  To the common citizen a
+violent death was (and is) the worst of horrors; to the ancient
+highwayman it was the odd trick lost in the game of life.  And
+the highwayman endured the rope, as the practised gambler loses
+his estate, without blenching.  One there was, who felt his leg
+tremble in his own despite: wherefore he stamped it upon the
+ground so violently, that in other circumstances he would
+have roared with pain, and he left the world without a
+tremor.  In this spirit Cranmer burnt his recreant right hand,
+and in either case the glamour of a unique occasion was a
+stimulus to courage.
+
+But not even this brilliant treatment of accessories availed to
+save the highway from disrepute; indeed, it had become the
+profitless pursuit of braggarts and loafers, long before the
+abolition of the stage-coach destroyed its opportunity.  In the
+meantime, however, the pickpocket was master of his trade.  His
+strategy was perfect, his sleight of hand as delicate as long,
+lithe fingers and nimble brains could make it.  He had discarded
+for ever those clumsy instruments whose use had barred the
+progress of the Primitives.  The breast-pocket behind the
+tightest buttoned coat presented no difficulty to his love of
+research, and he would penetrate the stoutest frieze or the
+lightest satin, as easily as Jack Sheppard made a hole through
+Newgate.  His trick of robbery was so simple and yet so
+successful, that ever since it has remained a tradition.  The
+collision, the victim's murmured apology, the hasty scuffle, the
+booty handed to the aide-de-camp, who is out of sight before
+the hue and cry can be raised--such was the policy advocated two
+hundred years ago; such is the policy pursued to day by the few
+artists that remain.
+
+Throughout the eighteenth century the art of cly-faking held its
+own, though its reputation paled in the glamour of the highway. 
+It culminated in George Barrington, whose vivid genius persuaded
+him to work alone and to carry off his own booty; it still
+flourished (in a silver age) when the incomparable Haggart
+performed his prodigies of skill; even in our prosaic time some
+flashes of the ancient glory have been seen.  Now and again
+circumstances have driven it into eclipse.  When the facile
+sentiment of the Early Victorian Era poised the tear of sympathy
+upon every trembling eyelid, the most obdurate was forced to
+provide himself with a silk handkerchief of equal size and value.
+
+Now, a wipe is the easiest booty in the world, and the Artful
+Dodger might grow rich without the exercise of the smallest
+skill.  But wipes dwindled, with dwindling sensibility; and once
+more the pickpocket was forced upon cleverness or extinction.
+
+At the same time the more truculent trade of housebreaking was
+winning a lesser triumph of its own.  Never, save in the hands of
+one or two distinguished practitioners, has this clumsy, brutal
+pursuit taken on the refinement of an art.  Essentially modern,
+it has generally been pursued in the meanest spirit of gain. 
+Deacon Brodie clung to it as to a diversion, but he was an
+amateur, without a clear understanding of his craft's
+possibilities.  The sole monarch of housebreakers was Charles
+Peace.  At a single stride he surpassed his predecessors; nor has
+the greatest of his imitators been worthy to hand on the candle
+which he left at the gallows.  For the rest, there is small
+distinction in breaking windows, wielding crowbars, and battering
+the brains of defenceless old gentlemen.  And it is to such
+miserable tricks as this that he who two centuries since rode
+abroad in all the glory of the High-toby-splice descends in these
+days of avarice and stupidity.  The legislators who decreed that
+henceforth the rope should be reserved for the ultimate crime of
+murder were inspired with a proper sense of humour and
+proportion.  It would be ignoble to dignify that ugly enterprise
+of to-day, the cracking of suburban cribs, with the same
+punishment which was meted out to Claude Duval and the immortal
+Switcher.  Better for the churl the disgrace of Portland than the
+chance of heroism and respect given at the Tree!
+
+And where are the heroes whose art was as glorious as their
+intrepidity?  One and all they have climbed the ascent of Tyburn.
+
+One and all, they have leaped resplendent from the cart.  The
+world, which was the joyous playground of highwaymen and
+pickpockets, is now the Arcadia of swindlers.  The man who once
+went forth to meet his equal on the road, now plunders the
+defenceless widow or the foolish clergyman from the security of
+an office.  He has changed Black Bess for a brougham, his pistol
+for a cigar; a sleek chimney-pot sits upon the head, which once
+carried a jaunty hat, three-cornered; spats have replaced the
+tops of ancient times; and a heavy fur coat advertises at once
+the wealth and inaction of the modern brigand.  No longer does he
+roam the heaths of Hounslow or Bagshot; no longer does he track
+the grazier to a country fair.  Fearful of an encounter, he
+chooses for the fields of his enterprise the byways of the
+City, and the advertisement columns of the smugly Christian
+Press.  He steals without risking his skin or losing his
+respectability.  The suburb, wherein he brings up a blameless,
+flat-footed family, regards him as its most renowned benefactor. 
+He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and
+oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes
+charities, and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a
+second-rate Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him,
+in the town-hall of his adopted borough.
+
+How much worse is he than the High-toby-cracks of old!  They were
+as brave as lions; he is a very louse for timidity.  His conduct
+is meaner than the conduct of the most ruffianly burglar that
+ever worked a centre-bit.  Of art he has not the remotest
+inkling: though his greed is bounded by the Bank of England, he
+understands not the elegancies of life; he cares not how he
+plumps his purse, so long as it be full; and if he were capable
+of conceiving a grand effect, he would willingly surrender it for
+a pocketed half-crown.  This side the Channel, in brief, romance
+and the picturesque are dead; and in France, the last refuge of
+crime, there are already signs of decay.  The Abb<e'> Bruneau
+caught a whiff of style and invention from the past.  That other
+Abb<e'>--Rosslot was his name--shone forth a pure creator: he
+owed his prowess to the example of none.  But in Paris crime is
+too often passionel, and a crime passionel is a crime with a
+purpose, which, like the novel with a purpose, is conceived
+by a dullard, and carried out for the gratification of the
+middle-class.
+
+To whitewash the scoundrel is to put upon him the heaviest
+dishonour: a dishonour comparable only to the monstrously
+illogical treatment of the condemned.  When once a hero has
+forfeited his right to comfort and freedom, when he is deemed no
+longer fit to live upon earth, the Prison Chaplain, encouraging
+him to a final act of hypocrisy, gives him a free pass (so to
+say) into another and more exclusive world.  So, too, the
+moralist would test the thief by his own narrow standard,
+forgetting that all professions are not restrained by the same
+code.  The road has its ordinances as well as the lecture-room;
+and if the thief is commonly a bad moralist, it is certain that
+no moralist was ever a great thief.  Why then detract from a
+man's legitimate glory?  Is it not wiser to respect `that deep
+intuition of oneness,' which Coleridge says is `at the bottom of
+our faults as well as our virtues?'  To recognise that a fault in
+an honest man is a virtue in a scoundrel?  After all, he is
+eminent who, in obedience to his talent, does prodigies of valour
+unrivalled by his fellows.  And none has so many opportunities of
+various eminence as the scoundrel.
+
+The qualities which may profitably be applied to a cross life are
+uncommon and innumerable.  It is not given to all men to be
+light-brained, light-limbed, light-fingered.  A courage which
+shall face an enemy under the starlight, or beneath the shadow of
+a wall, which shall track its prey to a well-defended lair,
+is far rarer than a law-abiding cowardice.  The recklessness that
+risks all for a present advantage is called genius, if a
+victorious general urge it to success; nor can you deny to the
+intrepid Highwayman, whose sudden resolution triumphs at an
+instant of peril, the possession of an admirable gift.  But all
+heroes have not proved themselves excellent at all points.  This
+one has been distinguished for the courtly manner of his attack,
+that other for a prescience which discovers booty behind a coach-
+door or within the pocket of a buttoned coat.  If Cartouche was a
+master of strategy, Barrington was unmatched in another branch;
+and each may claim the credit due to a peculiar eminence.  It is
+only thus that you may measure conflicting talents: as it were
+unfair to judge a poet by a brief experiment in prose, so it
+would be monstrous to cheapen the accomplishments of a
+pickpocket, because he bungled at the concealment of his gains.
+
+A stern test of artistry is the gallows.  Perfect behaviour at an
+enforced and public scrutiny may properly be esteemed an effect
+of talent--an effect which has not too often been rehearsed. 
+There is no reason why the Scoundrel, fairly beaten at the last
+point in the game, should not go to his death without swagger and
+without remorse.  At least he might comfort himself with such
+phrases as `a dance without the music,' and he has not often been
+lacking in courage.  What he has missed is dignity: his
+pitfalls have been unctuosity, on the one side, bravado on the
+other.  It was the Prison Ordinary, who first misled him into the
+assumption of a piety which neither preacher nor disciple
+understood.  It was the Prison Ordinary, who persuaded him to
+sign his name to a lying confession of guilt, drawn up in
+accordance with a foolish and inexorable tradition, and to
+deliver such a last dying speech as would not disappoint the mob.
+
+The set phrases, the vain prayer offered for other sinners, the
+hypocritical profession of a superior righteousness, were neither
+noble nor sincere.  When Tom Jones (for instance) was hanged, in
+1702, after a prosperous career on Hounslow Heath, his biographer
+declared that he behaved with more than usual `modesty and
+decency,' because he `delivered a pretty deal of good advice to
+the young men present, exhorting them to be industrious in their
+several callings.'  Whereas his biographer should have discovered
+that it is not thus that your true hero bids farewell to frolic
+and adventure.
+
+As little in accordance with good taste was the last appearance
+of the infamous Jocelin Harwood, who was swung from the cart in
+1692 for murder and robbery.  He arrived at Tyburn insolently
+drunk.  He blustered and ranted, until the spectators hissed
+their disapproval, and he died vehemently shouting that he would
+act the same murder again in the same case.  Unworthy, also, was
+the last dying repartee of Samuel Shotland, a notorious bully of
+the Eighteenth Century.  Taking off his shoes, he hurled them
+into the crowd, with a smirk of delight.  `My father and mother
+often told me,' he cried, `that I should die with my shoes on;
+but you may all see that I have made them both liars.'  A great
+man dies not with so mean a jest, and Tyburn was untouched to
+mirth by Shotland's facile humour.
+
+On the other hand, there are those who have given a splendid
+example of a brave and dignified death.  Brodie was a sorry
+bungler when at work, but a perfect artist at the gallows.  The
+glory of his last achievement will never fade.  The muttered
+prayer, unblemished by hypocrisy, the jest thrown at George
+Smith--a metaphor from the gaming-table--the silent adjustment of
+the cord which was to strangle him, these last offices were
+performed with an unparalleled quietude and restraint.  Though he
+had pattered the flash to all his wretched accomplices, there was
+no trace of the last dying speech in his final utterances, and he
+set an example of a simple greatness, worthy to be followed even
+to the end of time.  Such is the type, but others also have given
+proof of a serene temper.  Tom Austin's masterpiece was in
+another kind, but it was none the less a masterpiece.  At the
+very moment that the halter was being put about his neck, he was
+asked by the Chaplain what he had to say before he died.  `Only,'
+says he, `there's a woman yonder with some curds and whey, and I
+wish I could have a pennyworth of them before I am hanged,
+because I don't know when I shall see any again.'  There is a
+brave irrelevance in this very human desire, which is beyond
+praise.
+
+Valiant also was the conduct of Roderick Audrey, who after a
+brief but brilliant career paid his last debt to the law in 1714.
+
+He was but sixteen, and, says his biographer, `he went very
+decent to the gallows, being in a white waistcoat, clean napkin,
+white gloves, and an orange in one hand.'  So well did he play
+his part, that one wonders Jack Ketch did not shrink from the
+performance of his.  But throughout his short life, Roderick
+Audrey--the very name is an echo of romance!--displayed a
+contempt for whatever was common or ugly.  Not only was his
+appearance at Tyburn a lesson in elegance, but he thieved, as
+none ever thieved before or since, with no other accomplice than
+a singing-bird.  Thus he would play outside a house, wherein he
+espied a sideboard of plate, and at last, bidding his playmate
+flutter through an open window into the parlour, he would follow
+upon the excuse of recovery, and, once admitted, would carry off
+as much silver as he could conceal.  None other ever attempted so
+graceful an artifice, and yet Audrey's journey to Tyburn is even
+more memorable than the story of his gay accomplice.
+
+But it is not only the truly great who have won for themselves an
+enduring reputation.  There are men, not a few, esteemed, like
+the popular novelist, not for their art but for some foolish
+gift, some facile trick of notoriety, whose actions have tickled
+the fancy, not the understanding of the world.  The coward
+and the impostor have been set upon a pedestal of glory either by
+accident or by the whim of posterity.  For more than a century
+Dick Turpin has appeared not so much the greatest of highwaymen,
+as the Highwaymen Incarnate.  His prowess has been extolled in
+novels and upon the stage; his ride to York is still bepraised
+for a feat of miraculous courage and endurance; the death of
+Black Bess has drawn floods of tears down the most callous
+cheeks.  And the truth is that Turpin was never a gentleman of
+the road at all!  Black Bess is as pure an invention as the
+famous ride to York.  The ruffian, who is said to have ridden the
+phantom mare from one end of England to the other, was a common
+butcher, who burned an old woman to death at Epping, and was very
+properly hanged at York for the stealing of a horse which he
+dared not bestride.
+
+Not one incident in his career gives colour to the splendid myth
+which has been woven round his memory.  Once he was in London,
+and he died at York.  So much is true; but there is naught to
+prove that his progress from the one town to the other did not
+occupy a year.  Nor is there any reason why the halo should have
+been set upon his head rather than upon another's.  Strangest
+truth of all, none knows at what moment Dick Turpin first shone
+into glory.  At any rate, there is a gap in the tradition, and
+the chap-books of the time may not be credited with this vulgar
+error.  Perhaps it was the popular drama of Skelt which put
+the ruffian upon the black mare's back; but whatever the date of
+the invention, Turpin was a popular hero long before Ainsworth
+sent him rattling across England.  And in order to equip this
+butcher with a false reputation, a valiant officer and gentleman
+was stripped of the credit due to a magnificent achievement.  For
+though Turpin tramped to York at a journeyman's leisure, Nicks
+rode thither at a stretch--Nicks the intrepid and gallant, whom
+Charles II., in admiration of his feat, was wont to call
+Swiftnicks.
+
+This valiant collector, whom posterity has robbed for Turpin's
+embellishment, lived at the highest moment of his art.  He knew
+by rote the lessons taught by Hind and Duval; he was a fearless
+rider and a courteous thief.  Now, one morning at five of the
+clock, he robbed a gentleman near Barnet of <Pd>560, and riding
+straight for York, he appeared on the Bowling Green at six in the
+evening.  Being presently recognised by his victim, he was
+apprehended, and at the trial which followed he pleaded a
+triumphant alibi.  But vanity was too strong for discretion,
+and no sooner was Swiftnicks out of danger, than he boasted, as
+well he might, of his splendid courage.  Forthwith he appeared a
+popular hero, obtained a commission in Lord Moncastle's regiment,
+and married a fortune.  And then came Turpin to filch his glory! 
+Nor need Turpin have stooped to a vicarious notoriety, for he
+possessed a certain rough, half conscious humour, which was not
+despicable.  He purchased a new fustian coat and a pair of
+pumps, in which to be hanged, and he hired five poor men at ten
+shillings the day, that his death might not go unmourned.  Above
+all, he was distinguished in prison.  A crowd thronged his cell
+to identify him, and one there was who offered to bet the keeper
+half a guinea that the prisoner was not Turpin; whereupon Turpin
+whispered the keeper, `Lay him the wager, you fool, and I will go
+you halves.'  Surely this impudent indifference might have kept
+green the memory of the man who never rode to York!
+
+If the Scoundrel may claim distinction on many grounds, his
+character is singularly uniform.  To the anthropologist he might
+well appear the survival of a savage race, and savage also are
+his manifold superstitions.  He is a creature of times and
+seasons.  He chooses the occasion of his deeds with as scrupulous
+a care as he examines his formidable crowbars and jemmies.  At
+certain hours he would refrain from action, though every
+circumstance favoured his success: he would rather obey the
+restraining voice of a wise, unreasoning wizardry, than fill his
+pockets with the gold for which his human soul is ever hungry. 
+There is no law of man he dares not break but he shrinks in
+horror from the infringement of the unwritten rules of savagery. 
+Though he might cut a throat in self-defence, he would never walk
+under a ladder; and if the 13th fell on a Friday, he would starve
+that day rather than obtain a loaf by the method he best
+understands.  He consults the omens with as patient a
+divination as the augurs of old; and so long as he carries an
+amulet in his pocket, though it be but a pebble or a polished
+nut, he is filled with an irresistible courage.  For him the
+worst terror of all is the evil eye, and he would rather be
+hanged by an unsuspected judge than receive an easy stretch from
+one whose glance he dared not face.  And while the anthropologist
+claims him for a savage, whose civilisation has been arrested at
+brotherhood with the Solomon Islanders, the politician might
+pronounce him a true communist, in that he has preserved a
+wholesome contempt of property and civic life.  The pedant,
+again, would feel his bumps, prescribe a gentle course of
+bromide, and hope to cure all the sins of the world by a
+municipal Turkish bath.  The wise man, respecting his
+superstitions, is content to take him as he finds him, and to
+deduce his character from his very candid history, which is
+unaffected by pedant or politician.
+
+Before all things, he is sanguine; he believes that Chance, the
+great god of his endeavour, fights upon his side.  Whatever is
+lacking to-day, to-morrow's enterprise will fulfil, and if only
+the omens be favourable, he fears neither detection nor the
+gallows.  His courage proceeds from this sanguine temperament,
+strengthened by shame and tradition rather than from a self-
+controlled magnanimity; he hopes until despair is inevitable, and
+then walks firmly to the gallows, that no comrade may suspect the
+white feather.  His ambition, too, is the ambition of the
+savage or of the child; he despises such immaterial
+advantages as power and influence, being perfectly content if he
+have a smart coat on his back and a bottle of wine at his elbow. 
+He would rather pick a lock than batter a constitution, and the
+world would be well lost, if he and his doxy might survey the
+ruin in comfort.
+
+But if his ambition be modest, his love of notoriety is
+boundless.  He must be famous, his name must be in the mouths of
+men, he must be immortal (for a week) in a rough woodcut.  And
+then, what matters it how soon the end?  His braveries have been
+hawked in the street; his prowess has sold a Special Edition; he
+is the first of his race, until a luckier rival eclipses him. 
+Thus, also, his dandyism is inevitable: it is not enough for him
+to cover his nakedness--he must dress; and though his taste is
+sometimes unbridled, it is never insignificant.  Indeed, his
+biographers have recorded the expression of his fancy in coats
+and small-clothes as patiently and enthusiastically as they have
+applauded his courage.  And truly the love of magnificence, which
+he shares with all artists, is sincere and characteristic.  When
+an accomplice of Jonathan Wild's robbed Lady M----n at Windsor,
+his equipage cost him forty pounds; and Nan Hereford was arrested
+for shoplifting at the very moment that four footmen awaited her
+return with an elegant sedan-chair.
+
+His vanity makes him but a prudish lover, who desires to woo less
+than to be wooed; and at all times and through all moods he
+remains the primeval sentimentalist.  He will detach his life
+entirely from the catchwords which pretend to govern his actions;
+he will sit and croon the most heartrending ditties in
+celebration of home-life and a mother's love, and then set forth
+incontinently upon a well-planned errand of plunder.  For all his
+artistry, he lacks balance as flagrantly as a popular politician
+or an advanced journalist.  Therefore it is the more remarkable
+that in one point he displays a certain caution: he boggles at a
+superfluous murder.  For all his contempt of property, he still
+preserves a respect for life, and the least suspicion of
+unnecessary brutality sets not only the law but his own fellows
+against him.  Like all men whose god is Opportunity, he is a
+reckless gambler; and, like all gamblers, he is monstrously
+extravagant.  In brief, he is a tangle of picturesque qualities,
+which, until our own generation, was incapable of nothing save
+dulness.
+
+The Bible and the Newgate Calendar--these twain were George
+Borrow's favourite reading, and all save the psychologist and the
+pedant will applaud the preference.  For the annals of the
+`family' are distinguished by an epic severity, a fearless
+directness of speech, which you will hardly match outside the
+Iliad or the Chronicles of the Kings.  But the Newgate
+Calendar did not spring ready-made into being: it is the result
+of a curious and gradual development.  The chap-books came first,
+with their bold type, their coarse paper, and their clumsy,
+characteristic woodcuts--the chap-books, which none can
+contemplate without an enchanted sentiment.  Here at last you
+come upon a literature, which has been read to pieces.  The very
+rarity of the slim, rough volumes, proves that they have been
+handed from one greedy reader to another, until the great
+libraries alone are rich enough to harbour them.  They do not
+boast the careful elegance of a famous press: many of them came
+from the printing-office of a country town: yet the least has a
+simplicity and concision, which are unknown in this age of
+popular fiction.  Even their lack of invention is admirable: as
+the same woodcut might be used to represent Guy, Earl of Warwick,
+or the last highwayman who suffered at Tyburn, so the same
+enterprise is ascribed with a delightful ingenuousness to all the
+heroes who rode abroad under the stars to fill their pockets.
+
+The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey delighted England in
+1605, and was the example of after ages.  The anecdote of the
+road was already crystallised, and henceforth the robber was
+unable to act contrary to the will of the chap-book.  Thus there
+grew up a folk-lore of thievery: the very insistence upon the
+same motive suggests the fairytale, and, as in the legends of
+every country, there is an identical element which the
+anthropologists call `human'; so in the annals of adventure there
+is a set of invariable incidents, which are the essence of
+thievery.  The industrious hacks, to whom we owe the
+entertainment of the chap-books, being seedy parsons or lawyers'
+clerks, were conscious of their literary deficiencies: they
+preferred to obey tradition rather than to invent ineptitudes. 
+So you may trace the same jest, the same intrigue through the
+unnumbered lives of three centuries.  And if, being a
+philosopher, you neglect the obvious plagiarism, you may induce
+from these similarities a cunning theory concerning the
+uniformity of the human brain.  But the easier explanation is, as
+always, the more satisfactory; and there is little doubt that in
+versatility the thief surpassed his historian.
+
+Had the chap-books still been scattered in disregarded corners,
+they would have been unknown or misunderstood.  Happily, a man of
+genius came in the nick to convert them into as vivid and
+sparkling a piece of literature as the time could show.  This was
+Captain Alexander Smith, whose Lives of the Highwaymen,
+published in 1719, was properly described by its author as `the
+first impartial piece of this nature which ever appeared in
+English.'  Now, Captain Smith inherited from a nameless father no
+other patrimony than a fierce loyalty to the Stuarts, and the
+sanguine temperament which views in horror a well-ordered life. 
+Though a mere foundling, he managed to acquire the rudiments, and
+he was not wholly unlettered when at eighteen he took to the
+road.  His courage, fortified by an intimate knowledge of the
+great tradition, was rewarded by an immediate success, and he
+rapidly became the master of so much leisure as enabled him to
+pursue his studies with pleasure and distinction.  When his
+companions damned him for a milksop, he was loftily contemptuous,
+conscious that it was not in intelligence alone that he was their
+superior.  While the Stuarts were the gods of his idolatry, while
+the Regicides were the fiends of his frank abhorrence, it was
+from the Elizabethans that he caught the splendid vigour of his
+style; and he owed not only his historical sense, but his living
+English to the example of Philemon Holland.  Moreover, it is to
+his constant glory that, living at a time that preferred as well
+to attenuate the English tongue as to degrade the profession of
+the highway, he not only rode abroad with a fearless courtesy,
+but handled his own language with the force and spirit of an
+earlier age.
+
+He wrote with the authority of courage and experience.  A
+hazardous career had driven envy and malice from his dauntless
+breast.  Though he confesses a debt to certain `learned and
+eminent divines of the Church of England,' he owed a greater debt
+to his own observation, and he knew--none better--how to
+recognise with enthusiasm those deeds of daring which only
+himself has rivalled.  A master of etiquette, he distributed
+approval and censure with impartial hand; and he was quick to
+condemn the smallest infraction of an ancient law.  Nor was he
+insensible to the dignity of history.  The best models were
+always before him.  With admirable zeal he studied the manner
+of such masters as Thucydides and Titus Livius of Padua.  Above
+all, he realised the importance of setting appropriate speeches
+in the mouths of his characters; and, permitting his heroes to
+speak for themselves, he imparted to his work an irresistible air
+of reality and good faith.  His style, always studied, was
+neither too low nor too high for his subject.  An ill-balanced
+sentence was as hateful to him as a foul thrust or a stolen
+advantage.
+
+Abroad a craftsman, he carried into the closet the skill and
+energy which distinguished him when the moon was on the heath. 
+Though not born to the arts of peace, he was determined to prove
+his respect for letters, and his masterpiece is no less pompous
+in manner than it is estimable in tone and sound in reflection. 
+He handled slang as one who knew its limits and possibilities,
+employing it not for the sake of eccentricity, but to give the
+proper colour and sparkle to his page; indeed, his intimate
+acquaintance with the vagabonds of speech enabled him to compile
+a dictionary of Pedlar's French, which has been pilfered by a
+whole battalion of imitators.  Moreover, there was none of the
+proverbs of the pavement, those first cousins of slang, that
+escaped him; and he assumed all the licence of the gentleman-
+collector in the treatment of his love-passages.
+
+Captain Smith took the justest view of his subject.
+For him robbery, in the street as on the highway,
+was the finest of the arts, and he always revered it for its
+own sake rather than for vulgar profit.  Though, to deceive the
+public, he abhorred villainy in word, he never concealed his
+admiration in deed of a `highwayman who robs like a gentleman.' 
+`There is a beauty in all the works of nature,' he observes in
+one of his wittiest exordia, `which we are unable to define,
+though all the world is convinced of its existence: so in every
+action and station of life there is a grace to be attained, which
+will make a man pleasing to all about him and serene in his own
+mind.'  Some there are, he continues, who have placed `this
+beauty in vice itself; otherwise it is hardly probable that they
+could commit so many irregularities with a strong gust and an
+appearance of satisfaction.'  Notwithstanding that the word
+`vice' is used in its conventional sense, we have here the key to
+Captain Smith's position.  He judged his heroes' achievements
+with the intelligent impartiality of a connoisseur, and he
+permitted no other prejudice than an unfailing loyalty to
+interrupt his opinion.
+
+Though he loved good English as he loved good wine, he was never
+so happy as when (in imagination) he was tying the legs of a
+Regicide under the belly of an ass.  And when in the manner of a
+bookseller's hack he compiled a Comical and Tragical History of
+the Lives and Adventures of the most noted Bayliffs, adoration
+of the Royalists persuaded him to miss his chance.  So brave a
+spirit as himself should not have looked complacently upon the
+officers of the law, but he saw in the glorification of the
+bayliff another chance of castigating the Roundheads, and
+thus he set an honorific crown upon the brow of man's natural
+enemy.  `These unsanctified rascals,' wrote he, `would run into
+any man's debt without paying him, and if their creditors were
+Cavaliers they thought they had as much right to cheat 'em, as
+the Israelites had to spoil the Egyptians of their ear-rings and
+jewels.'  Alas! the boot was ever on the other leg; and yet you
+cannot but admire the Captain's valiant determination to
+sacrifice probability to his legitimate hate.
+
+Of his declining years and death there is no record.  One likes
+to think of him released from care, and surrounded by books,
+flowers, and the good things of this earth.  Now and again,
+maybe, he would muse on the stirring deeds of his youth, and more
+often he would put away the memory of action to delight in the
+masterpiece which made him immortal.  He would recall with
+pleasure, no doubt, the ready praise of Richard Steele, his most
+appreciative critic, and smile contemptuously at the baseness of
+his friend and successor, Captain Charles Johnson.  Now, this
+ingenious writer was wont to boast, when the ale of Fleet Street
+had empurpled his nose, that he was the most intrepid highwayman
+of them all.  `Once upon a time,' he would shout, with an
+arrogant gesture, `I was known from Blackheath to Hounslow, from
+Ware to Shooter's Hill.'  And the truth is, the only `crime' he
+ever committed was plagiarism.  The self-assumed title of
+Captain should have deceived nobody, for the braggart never
+stole anything more difficult of acquisition than another man's
+words.  He picked brains, not pockets; he committed the greater
+sin and ran no risk.  He helped himself to the admirable
+inventions of Captain Smith without apology or acknowledgment,
+and, as though to lighten the dead-weight of his sin, he never
+skipped an opportunity of maligning his victim.  Again and again
+in the very act to steal he will declare vaingloriously that
+Captain Smith's stories are `barefaced inventions.'  But doubt
+was no check to the habit of plunder, and you knew that at every
+reproach, expressed (so to say) in self-defence, he plied the
+scissors with the greater energy.  The most cunning theft is the
+tag which adorns the title-page of his book:
+
+     Little villains oft submit to fate
+     That great ones may enjoy the world in state.
+
+Thus he quotes from Gay, and you applaud the aptness of the
+quotation, until you discover that already it was used by Steele
+in his appreciation of the heroic Smith!  However, Johnson has
+his uses, and those to whom the masterpiece of Captain Alexander
+is inaccessible will turn with pleasure to the General History
+of the lives and adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen,
+Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c., and will feel no regret that for
+once they are receiving stolen goods.
+
+Though Johnson fell immeasurably below his predecessor in
+talent, he manifestly excelled him in scholarship.  A sojourn at
+the University had supplied him with a fine assortment of Latin
+tags, and he delighted to prove his erudition by the citation of
+the Chronicles.  Had he possessed a sense of humour, he might
+have smiled at the irony of committing a theft upon the historian
+of thieves.  But he was too vain and too pompous to smile at his
+own weakness, and thus he would pretend himself a venturesome
+highwayman, a brave writer, and a profound scholar.  Indeed, so
+far did his pride carry him, that he would have the world believe
+him the same Charles Johnson, who wrote The Gentleman Cully and
+The Successful Pyrate.  Thus with a boastful chuckle he would
+quote:
+
+     Johnson, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning,
+     Means not, but blunders round about a meaning
+
+Thus, ignoring the insult, he would plume himself after his
+drunken fashion that he, too, was an enemy of Pope.
+
+     Yet Johnson has remained an example.  For the literature of
+scoundrelism is as persistent in its form as in its folk-lore. 
+As Harman's Caveat, which first saw the light in 1566, serves
+as a model to an unbroken series of such books, as The London
+Spy, so from Johnson in due course were developed the Newgate
+Calendar, and those innumerable records, which the latter half
+of the Eighteenth Century furnished us forth.  The celebrated
+Calendar was in its origin nothing more than a list of
+prisoners printed in a folio slip.  But thereafter it became the
+Malefactor's Bloody Register, which we know.  Its plan and
+purpose were to improve the occasion.  The thief is no longer
+esteemed for an artist or appraised upon his merits: he is the
+awful warning, which shall lead the sinner to repentance. 
+`Here,' says the preface, `the giddy thoughtless youth may see as
+in a mirror the fatal consequences of deviating from virtue';
+here he may tremble at the discovery that `often the best talents
+are prostituted to the basest purposes.'  But in spite of `the
+proper reflections of the whole affair,' the famous Calendar
+deserved the praise of Borrow.  There is a directness in the
+narration, which captures all those for whom life and literature
+are something better than psychologic formul<ae>.  Moreover, the
+motives which drive the brigand to his doom are brutal in their
+simplicity, and withal as genuine and sincere as greed, vanity,
+and lust can make them.  The true amateur takes pleasure even in
+the pious exhortations, because he knows that they crawl into
+their place, lest the hypocrite be scandalised.  But with years
+the Newgate Calendar also declined, and at last it has followed
+other dead literatures into the night.
+
+Meanwhile the broadside had enjoyed an unbroken and prosperous
+career.  Up and down London, up and down England, hurried the
+Patterer or Flying Stationer.  There was no murder, no theft, no
+conspiracy, which did not tempt the Gutter Muse to doggerel. 
+But it was not until James Catnach came up from Alnwick to London
+(in 1813), that the trade reached the top of its prosperity.  The
+vast sheets, which he published with their scurvy couplets, and
+the admirable picture, serving in its time for a hundred
+executions, have not lost their power to fascinate.  Theirs is
+the aspect of the early woodcut; the coarse type and the
+catchpenny headlines are a perpetual delight; as you unfold them,
+your care keeps pace with your admiration; and you cannot feel
+them crackle beneath your hand without enthusiasm and without
+regret.  He was no pedant--Jemmy Catnach; and the image of his
+ruffians was commonly as far from portraiture, as his verses were
+remote from poetry.  But he put together in a roughly artistic
+shape the last murder, robbery, or scandal of the day.  His
+masterpieces were far too popular to live, and if they knew so
+vast a circulation as 2,500,000 they are hard indeed to come by. 
+And now the art is wellnigh dead; though you may discover an
+infrequent survival in a country town.  But how should Catnach,
+were he alive to-day, compete with the Special Edition of an
+evening print?
+
+The decline of the Scoundrel, in fact, has been followed by the
+disappearance of chap-book and broadside.  The Education Act,
+which made the cheap novel a necessity, destroyed at a blow the
+literature of the street.  Since the highwayman wandered, fur-
+coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation. 
+Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles,
+whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain.  The
+misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature,
+for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of
+Captain Smith.  Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited,
+and it is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye
+of a moral and unimaginative world.  Yet the wise man sighs for
+those fearless days, when the brilliant Macheath rode vizarded
+down Shooter's Hill, and presently saw his exploits set forth,
+with the proper accompaniment of a renowned and ancient woodcut,
+upon a penny broadside.
+
+
+
+CAPTAIN HIND
+
+
+CAPTAIN HIND
+
+JAMES HIND, the Master Thief of England, the fearless Captain of
+the Highway, was born at Chipping Norton in 1618.  His father, a
+simple saddler, had so poor an appreciation of his son's
+magnanimity, that he apprenticed him to a butcher; but Hind's
+destiny was to embrue his hands in other than the blood of oxen,
+and he had not long endured the restraint of this common craft
+when forty shillings, the gift of his mother, purchased him an
+escape, and carried him triumphant and ambitious to London.
+
+Even in his negligent schooldays he had fastened upon a fitting
+career.  A born adventurer, he sought only enterprise and
+command: if a commission in the army failed him, then he would
+risk his neck upon the road, levying his own tax and imposing his
+own conditions.  To one of his dauntless resolution an
+opportunity need never have lacked; yet he owed his first
+preferment to a happy accident.  Surprised one evening in a
+drunken brawl, he was hustled into the Poultry Counter, and there
+made acquaintance over a fresh bottle with Robert Allen, one of
+the chief rogues in the Park, and a ruffian, who had mastered
+every trick in the game of plunder.  A dexterous cly-faker, an
+intrepid blade, Allen had also the keenest eye for untested
+talent, and he detected Hind's shining qualities after the first
+glass.  No sooner had they paid the price of release, than Hind
+was admitted of his comrade's gang; he took the oath of fealty,
+and by way of winning his spurs was bid to hold up a traveller on
+Shooter's Hill.  Granted his choice of a mount, he straightway
+took the finest in the stable, with that keen perception of
+horse-flesh which never deserted him, and he confronted his first
+victim in the liveliest of humours.  There was no falter in his
+voice, no hint of inexperience in his manner, when he shouted the
+battle-cry:  `Stand and deliver!'  The horseman, fearful of his
+life, instantly surrendered a purse of ten sovereigns, as to the
+most practised assailant on the road.  Whereupon Hind, with a
+flourish of ancient courtesy, gave him twenty shillings to bear
+his charges.  `This,' said he, `is for handsale sake '; and thus
+they parted in mutual compliment and content.
+
+Allen was overjoyed at his novice's prowess.  `Did you not see,'
+he cried to his companions, `how he robbed him with a grace?' 
+And well did the trooper deserve his captain's compliment, for
+his art was perfect from the first.  In bravery as in gallantry
+he knew no rival, and he plundered with so elegant a style, that
+only a churlish victim could resent the extortion.  He would as
+soon have turned his back upon an enemy as demand a purse
+uncovered.  For every man he had a quip, for every woman a
+compliment; nor did he ever conceal the truth that the means were
+for him as important as the end.  Though he loved money, he still
+insisted that it should be yielded in freedom and good temper;
+and while he emptied more coaches than any man in England, he was
+never at a loss for admirers.
+
+Under Allen he served a brilliant apprenticeship.  Enrolled as a
+servant, he speedily sat at the master's right hand, and his
+nimble brains devised many a pretty campaign.  For a while
+success dogged the horse-hoofs of the gang; with wealth came
+immunity, and not one of the warriors had the misfortune to look
+out upon the world through a grate.  They robbed with dignity,
+even with splendour.  Now they would drive forth in a coach and
+four, carrying with them a whole armoury of offensive weapons;
+now they would take the road apparelled as noblemen, and attended
+at a discreet distance by their proper servants.  But
+recklessness brought the inevitable disaster; and it was no less
+a personage than Oliver Cromwell who overcame the hitherto
+invincible Allen.  A handful of the gang attacked Oliver on his
+way from Huntingdon, but the marauders were outmatched, and the
+most of them were forced to surrender.  Allen, taken red-handed,
+swung at Tyburn; Hind, with his better mount and defter
+horsemanship, rode clear away.
+
+The loss of his friend was a lesson in caution, and
+henceforth Hind resolved to follow his craft in solitude.  He
+had embellished his native talent with all the instruction that
+others could impart, and he reflected that he who rode alone
+neither ran risk of discovery nor had any need to share his
+booty.  Thus he began his easy, untrammelled career, making time
+and space of no account by his rapid, fearless journeys.  Now he
+was prancing the moors of Yorkshire, now he was scouring the
+plain between Gloucester and Tewkesbury, but wherever he rode, he
+had a purse in his pocket and a jest on his tongue.  To recall
+his prowess is to ride with him (in fancy) under the open sky
+along the fair, beaten road; to put up with him at the busy,
+white posthouse, to drink unnumbered pints of mulled sack with
+the round-bellied landlord, to exchange boastful stories over the
+hospitable fire, and to ride forth in the morning with the joyous
+uncertainty of travel upon you.  Failure alone lay outside his
+experience, and he presently became at once the terror and the
+hero of England.
+
+Not only was his courage conspicuous; luck also was his constant
+companion; and a happy bewitchment protected him for three years
+against the possibility of harm.  He had been lying at Hatfield,
+at the George Inn, and set out in the early morning for London. 
+As he neared the town-gate, an old beldame begged an alms of him,
+and though Hind, not liking her ill-favoured visage, would have
+spurred forward, the beldame's glittering eye held his horse
+motionless.  `Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown,
+`I am in haste; pray let me pass.'  `Sir,' answered the witch,
+`three days I have awaited your coming.  Would you have me lose
+my labour now?'  And with Hind's assent the sphinx delivered her
+message:  `Captain Hind,' said she, `your life is beset with
+constant danger, and since from your birth I have wished you
+well, my poor skill has devised a perfect safeguard.'  With this
+she gave him a small box containing what might have been a
+sundial or compass.  `Watch this star,' quoth she, `and when you
+know not your road, follow its guidance.  Thus you shall be
+preserved from every peril for the space of three years. 
+Thereafter, if you still have faith in my devotion, seek me
+again, and I will renew the virtue of the charm.'
+
+Hind took the box joyfully; but when he turned to murmur a word
+of gratitude, the witch struck his nag's flanks with a white
+wand, the horse leapt vehemently forward, and Hind saw his
+benefactress no more.  Henceforth, however, a warning voice spoke
+to him as plainly as did the demon to Socrates; and had he but
+obeyed the beldame's admonition, he might have escaped a violent
+death.  For he passed the last day of the third year at the siege
+of Youghal, where; deprived of happy guidance, he was seriously
+wounded, and whence he presently regained England to his own
+undoing.
+
+So long as he kept to the road, his life was one long comedy. 
+His wit and address were inexhaustible, and fortune never
+found him at a loss.  He would avert suspicion with the tune of a
+psalm, as when, habited like a pious shepherd, he broke a
+traveller's head with his crook, and deprived him of his horse. 
+An early adventure was to force a pot-valiant parson, who had
+drunk a cup too much at a wedding, into a rarely farcical
+situation.  Hind, having robbed two gentlemen's servants of a
+round sum, went ambling along the road until he encountered a
+parson.  `Sir,' said he, `I am closely pursued by robbers.  You,
+I dare swear, will not stand by and see me plundered.'  Before
+the parson could protest, he thrust a pistol into his hand, and
+bade him fire it at the first comer, while he rode off to raise
+the county.  Meanwhile the rifled travellers came up with the
+parson, who, straightway, mistaking them for thieves, fired
+without effect, and then, riding forward, flung the pistol in the
+face of the nearest.  Thus the parson of the parish was dragged
+before the magistrate, while Hind, before his dupe could furnish
+an explanation, had placed many a mile between himself and his
+adversary.
+
+Though he could on occasion show a clean pair of heels, Hind was
+never lacking in valiance; and, another day, meeting a traveller
+with a hundred pounds in his pocket, he challenged him to fight
+there and then, staked his own horse against the money, and
+declared that he should win who drew first blood.  `If I am the
+conqueror,' said the magnanimous Captain, `I will give you ten
+pounds for your journey.  If you are favoured of fortune, you
+shall give me your servant's horse.'  The terms were
+instantly accepted, and in two minutes Hind had run his adversary
+through the sword-arm.  But finding that his victim was but a
+poor squire going to London to pay his composition, he not only
+returned his money, but sought him out a surgeon, and gave him
+the best dinner the countryside could afford.
+
+Thus it was his pleasure to act as a providence, many a time
+robbing Peter to pay Paul, and stripping the niggard that he
+might indulge his fervent love of generosity.  Of all usurers and
+bailiffs he had a wholesome horror, and merry was the prank which
+he played upon the extortionate money-lender of Warwick.  Riding
+on an easy rein through the town, Hind heard a tumult at a street
+corner, and inquiring the cause, was told that an innkeeper was
+arrested by a thievish usurer for a paltry twenty pounds. 
+Dismounting, this providence in jack-boots discharged the debt,
+cancelled the bond, and took the innkeeper's goods for his own
+security.  And thereupon overtaking the usurer, `My friend!' he
+exclaimed, `I lent you late a sum of twenty pounds.  Repay it at
+once, or I take your miserable life.'  The usurer was obliged to
+return the money, with another twenty for interest, and when he
+would take the law of the innkeeper, was shown the bond duly
+cancelled, and was flogged wellnigh to death for his pains.
+
+So Hind rode the world up and down, redressing grievances like an
+Eastern monarch, and rejoicing in the abasement of the evildoer. 
+Nor was the spirit of his adventure bounded by the ocean. 
+More than once he crossed the seas; the Hague knew him, and
+Amsterdam, though these somnolent cities gave small occasion for
+the display of his talents.  It was from Scilly that he crossed
+to the Isle of Man, where, being recommended to Lord Derby, he
+gained high favour, and received in exchange for his jests a
+comfortable stipend.  Hitherto, said the Chronicles, thieving was
+unknown in the island.  A man might walk whither he would, a bag
+of gold in one hand, a switch in the other, and fear no danger. 
+But no sooner had Hind appeared at Douglas than honest citizens
+were pilfered at every turn.  In dismay they sought the
+protection of the Governor, who instantly suspected Hind, and
+gallantly disclosed his suspicions to the Captain.  `My lord!'
+exclaimed Hind, a blush upon his cheek, `I protest my innocence;
+but willingly will I suffer the heaviest penalty of your law if I
+am recognised for the thief.'  The victims, confronted with their
+robber, knew him not, picturing to the Governor a monster with
+long hair and unkempt beard.  Hind, acquitted with apologies,
+fetched from his lodging the disguise of periwig and beard. 
+`They laugh who win!' he murmured, and thus forced forgiveness
+and a chuckle even from his judges.
+
+As became a gentleman-adventurer, Captain Hind was staunch in his
+loyalty to his murdered King.  To strip the wealthy was always
+reputable, but to rob a Regicide was a masterpiece of well-doing.
+
+A fervent zeal to lighten Cromwell's pocket had brought the
+illustrious Allen to the gallows.  But Hind was not one whit
+abashed, and he would never forego the chance of an encounter
+with his country's enemies.  His treatment of Hugh Peters in
+Enfield Chace is among his triumphs.  At the first encounter the
+Presbyterian plucked up courage enough to oppose his adversary
+with texts.  To Hind's command of `Stand and deliver!' duly
+enforced with a loaded pistol, the ineffable Peters replied with
+ox-eye sanctimoniously upturned:  `Thou shalt not steal; let him
+that stole, steal no more,' adding thereto other variations of
+the eighth commandment.  Hind immediately countered with
+exhortations against the awful sin of murder, and rebuked the
+blasphemy of the Regicides, who, to defend their own infamy,
+would wrest Scripture from its meaning.  `Did you not, O monster
+of impiety,' mimicked Hind in the preacher's own voice, `pervert
+for your own advantage the words of the Psalmist, who said,
+``Bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of
+iron''?  Moreover, was it not Solomon who wrote:  ``Men do not
+despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is
+hungry''?  And is not my soul hungry for gold and the Regicides'
+discomfiture?'  Peters was still fumbling after texts when the
+final argument:  `Deliver thy money, or I will send thee out of
+the world!' frightened him into submission, and thirty broad
+pieces were Hind's reward.
+
+Not long afterwards he confronted Bradshaw near Sherborne, and,
+having taken from him a purse fat with Jacobuses, he bade the
+Sergeant stand uncovered while he delivered a discourse upon
+gold, thus shaped by tradition:  `Ay, marry, sir, this is the
+metal that wins my heart for ever!  O precious gold, I admire and
+adore thee as much as Bradshaw, Prynne, or any villain of the
+same stamp.  This is that incomparable medicament, which the
+republican physicians call the wonder-working plaster.  It is
+truly catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the Jesuit's
+powder, but more effectual.  The virtues of it are strange and
+various; it makes justice deaf as well as blind, and takes out
+spots of the deepest treason more cleverly than castle-soap does
+common stains; it alters a man's constitution in two or three
+days, more than the virtuoso's transfusion of blood can do in
+seven years.  `Tis a great alexiopharmick, and helps poisonous
+principles of rebellion, and those that use them.  It
+miraculously exalts and purifies the eyesight, and makes traitors
+behold nothing but innocence in the blackest malefactors.  `Tis a
+mighty cordial for a declining cause; it stifles faction or
+schism, as certainly as the itch is destroyed by butter and
+brimstone.  In a word, it makes wise men fools, and fools wise
+men, and both knaves.  The very colour of this precious balm is
+bright and dazzling.  If it be properly applied to the fist, that
+is in a decent manner, and a competent dose, it infallibly
+performs all the cures which the evils of humanity crave.'  Thus
+having spoken, he killed the six horses of Bradshaw's coach, and
+went contemptuously on his way.
+
+
+But he was not a Cavalier merely in sympathy, nor was he content
+to prove his loyalty by robbing Roundheads.  He, too, would
+strike a blow for his King, and he showed, first with the royal
+army in Scotland, and afterwards at Worcester, what he dared in a
+righteous cause.  Indeed, it was his part in the unhappy battle
+that cost him his life, and there is a strange irony in the
+reflection that, on the self-same day whereon Sir Thomas Urquhart
+lost his precious manuscripts in Worcester's kennels, the neck of
+James Hind was made ripe for the halter.  His capture was due to
+treachery.  Towards the end of 1651 he was lodged with one
+Denzys, a barber, over against St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet
+Street.  Maybe he had chosen his hiding-place for its
+neighbourhood to Moll Cutpurse's own sanctuary.  But a pack of
+traitors discovered him, and haling him before the Speaker of the
+House of Commons, got him committed forthwith to Newgate.
+
+At first he was charged with theft and murder, and was actually
+condemned for killing George Sympson at Knole in Berkshire.  But
+the day after his sentence, an Act of Oblivion was passed, and
+Hind was put upon trial for treason.  During his examination he
+behaved with the utmost gaiety, boastfully enlarging upon his
+services to the King's cause.  `These are filthy jingling spurs,'
+said he as he left the bar, pointing to the irons about his legs,
+`but I hope to exchange them ere long.'  His good-humour remained
+with him to the end.  He jested in prison as he jested on the
+road, and it was with a light heart that he mounted the scaffold
+built for him at Worcester.  His was the fate reserved for
+traitors: he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and though his
+head was privily stolen and buried on the day of execution, his
+quarters were displayed upon the town walls, until time and the
+birds destoyed{sic} them utterly.
+
+Thus died the most famous highwayman that ever drew rein upon an
+English road; and he died the death of a hero.  The unnumbered
+crimes of violence and robbery wherewith he might have been
+charged weighed not a feather's weight upon his destiny; he
+suffered not in the cause of plunder, but in the cause of Charles
+Stuart.  And in thus excusing his death, his contemporaries did
+him scant justice.  For while in treasonable loyalty he had a
+thousand rivals, on the road he was the first exponent of the
+grand manner.  The middle of the seventeenth century was, in
+truth, the golden age of the Road.  Not only were all the
+highwaymen Cavaliers, but many a Cavalier turned highwayman. 
+Broken at their King's defeat, a hundred captains took pistol and
+vizard, and revenged themselves as freebooters upon the King's
+enemies.  And though Hind was outlaw first and royalist
+afterwards, he was still the most brilliant collector of them
+all.  If he owed something to his master, Allen, he added from
+the storehouse of his own genius a host of new precepts, and was
+the first to establish an enduring tradition.
+
+Before all things he insisted upon courtesy; a guinea stolen
+by an awkward ruffian was a sorry theft; levied by a gentleman of
+the highway, it was a tribute paid to courage by generosity. 
+Nothing would atone for an insult offered to a lady; and when it
+was Hind's duty to seize part of a gentlewoman's dowry on the
+Petersfield road, he not only pleaded his necessity in eloquent
+excuse, but he made many promises on behalf of knight-errantry
+and damsels in distress.  Never would he extort a trinket to
+which association had given a sentimental worth; during a long
+career he never left any man, save a Roundhead, penniless upon
+the road; nor was it his custom to strip the master without
+giving the man a trifle for his pains.  His courage, moreover,
+was equal to his understanding.  Since he was afraid of nothing,
+it was not his habit to bluster when he was not determined to
+have his way.  When once his pistol was levelled, when once the
+solemn order was given, the victim must either fight or
+surrender; and Hind was never the man to decline a combat with
+any weapons and in any circumstances.
+
+Like the true artist that he was, he neglected no detail of his
+craft.  As he was a perfect shot, so also he was a finished
+horseman; and his skill not only secured him against capture, but
+also helped him to the theft of such horses as his necessities
+required, or to the exchange of a worn-out jade for a mettled
+prancer.  Once upon a time a credulous farmer offered twenty
+pounds and his own gelding for the Captain's mount.  Hind struck
+a bargain at once, and as they jogged along the road he
+persuaded the farmer to set his newly-purchased horse at the
+tallest hedge, the broadest ditch.  The bumpkin failed, as Hind
+knew he would fail; and, begging the loan for an instant of his
+ancient steed, Hind not only showed what horsemanship could
+accomplish, but straightway rode off with the better horse and
+twenty pounds in his pocket.  So marvellously did his reputation
+grow, that it became a distinction to be outwitted by him, and
+the brains of innocent men were racked to invent tricks which
+might have been put upon them by the illustrious Captain.  Thus
+livelier jests and madder exploits were fathered upon him than
+upon any of his kind, and he has remained for two centuries the
+prime favourite of the chap-books.
+
+Robbing alone, he could afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a
+traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word
+(`the fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had
+not its code of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his
+purpose, to rob the bunglers of his own profession.  By this
+means, indeed, he raised the standard of the Road and warned the
+incompetent to embrace an easier trade.  While he never took a
+shilling without sweetening his depredation with a joke, he was,
+like all humorists, an acute philosopher.  `Remember what I tell
+you,' he said to the foolish persons who once attempted to rob
+him, the master-thief of England, `disgrace not yourself for
+small sums, but aim high, and for great ones; the least will
+bring you to the gallows.'  There, in five lines, is the
+whole philosophy of thieving, and many a poor devil has leapt
+from the cart to his last dance because he neglected the counsel
+of the illustrious Hind.  Among his aversions were lawyers and
+thief-catchers.  `Truly I could wish,' he exclaimed in court,
+`that full-fed fees were as little used in England among lawyers
+as the eating of swine's flesh was among the Jews.'  When you
+remember the terms of friendship whereon he lived with Moll
+Cutpurse, his hatred of the thief-catcher, who would hang his
+brother for `the lucre of ten pounds, which is the reward,' or
+who would swallow a false oath `as easily as one would swallow
+buttered fish,' is a trifle mysterious.  Perhaps before his death
+an estrangement divided Hind and Moll.  Was it that the Roaring
+Girl was too anxious to take the credit of Hind's success?  Or
+did he harbour the unjust suspicion that when the last descent
+was made upon him at the barber's, Moll might have given a
+friendly warning?
+
+Of this he made no confession, but the honest thief was ever a
+liberal hater of spies and attorneys, and Hind's prudence is
+unquestioned.  A miracle of intelligence, a master of style, he
+excelled all his contemporaries and set up for posterity an
+unattainable standard.  The eighteenth century flattered him by
+its imitation; but cowardice and swagger compelled it to limp
+many a dishonourable league behind.  Despite the single
+inspiration of dancing a corant upon the green, Claude Duval,
+compared to Hind, was an empty braggart.  Captain Stafford
+spoiled the best of his effects with a more than brutal vice. 
+Neither Mull-Sack nor the Golden Farmer, for all their long life
+and handsome plunder, are comparable for an instant to the robber
+of Peters and Bradshaw.  They kept their fist fiercely upon the
+gold of others, and cared not by what artifice it was extorted. 
+Hind never took a sovereign meanly; he approached no enterprise
+which he did not adorn.  Living in a true Augustan age, he was a
+classic among highwaymen, the very Virgil of the Pad.
+
+
+
+MOLL CUTPURSE AND
+JONATHAN WILD
+
+I
+MOLL CUTPURSE
+
+
+
+MOLL CUTPURSE
+
+THE most illustrious woman of an illustrious age, Moll Cutpurse
+has never lacked the recognition due to her genius.  She was
+scarce of age when the town devoured in greedy admiration the
+first record of her pranks and exploits.  A year later Middleton
+made her the heroine of a sparkling comedy.  Thereafter she
+became the favourite of the rufflers, the commonplace of the
+poets.  Newgate knew her, and Fleet Street; her manly figure was
+as familiar in the Bear Garden as at the Devil Tavern; courted
+alike by the thief and his victim, for fifty years she lived a
+life brilliant as sunlight, many-coloured as a rainbow.  And she
+is remembered, after the lapse of centuries, not only as the
+Queen-Regent of Misrule, the benevolent tyrant of cly-filers and
+heavers, of hacks and blades, but as the incomparable Roaring
+Girl, free of the playhouse, who perchance presided with Ben
+Jonson over the Parliament of Wits.
+
+She was born in the Barbican at the heyday of England's
+greatness, four years after the glorious defeat of the Armada,
+and had to her father an honest shoemaker.  She came into the
+world (saith rumour) with her fist doubled, and even in the
+cradle gave proof of a boyish, boisterous disposition.  Her
+girlhood, if the word be not an affront to her mannish character,
+was as tempestuous as a wind-blown petticoat.  A very `tomrig and
+rump-scuttle,' she knew only the sports of boys: her war-like
+spirit counted no excuse too slight for a battle; and so valiant
+a lad was she of her hands, so well skilled in cudgel-play, that
+none ever wrested a victory from fighting Moll.  While other
+girls were content to hem a kerchief or mark a sampler, Moll
+would escape to the Bear Garden, and there enjoy the sport of
+baiting, whose loyal patron she remained unto the end.  That
+which most bitterly affronted her was the magpie talk of the
+wenches.  `Why,' she would ask in a fury of indignation, `why
+crouch over the fire with a pack of gossips, when the highway
+invites you to romance?  Why finger a distaff, when a
+quarterstaff comes more aptly to your hand?'
+
+And thus she grew in age and stature, a stranger to the soft
+delights of her sex, her heart still deaf to the trivial voice of
+love.  Had not a wayward accident cumbered her with a kirtle, she
+would have sought death or glory in the wars; she would have gone
+with Colonel Downe's men upon the road; she would have sailed to
+the Spanish Main for pieces of eight.  But the tyranny of
+womanhood was as yet supreme, and the honest shoemaker, ignorant
+of his daughter's talent, bade her take service at a
+respectable saddler's, and thus suppress the frowardness of her
+passion.  Her rebellion was instant.  Never would she abandon the
+sword and the wrestling-booth for the harmless bodkin and the
+hearthstone of domesticity.  Being absolute in refusal, she was
+kidnapped by her friends and sent on board a ship, bound for
+Virginia and slavery.  There, in the dearth of womankind, even so
+sturdy a wench as Moll might have found a husband; but the
+enterprise was little to her taste, and, always resourceful, she
+escaped from shipboard before the captain had weighed his anchor.
+
+Henceforth she resolved her life should be free and chainless as
+the winds.  Never more should needle and thread tempt her to a
+womanish inactivity.  As Hercules, whose counterpart she was,
+changed his club for the distaff of Omphale, so would she put off
+the wimple and bodice of her sex for jerkin and galligaskins.  If
+she could not allure manhood, then would she brave it.  And
+though she might not cross swords with her country's foes, at
+least she might levy tribute upon the unjustly rich, and confront
+an enemy wherever there was a full pocket.
+
+Her entrance into a gang of thieves was beset by no difficulty. 
+The Bear Garden, always her favourite resort, had made her
+acquainted with all the divers and rumpads of the town.  The
+time, moreover, was favourable to enterprise, and once again was
+genius born into a golden age.  The cutting of purses was an
+art brought to perfection, and already the more elegant practice
+of picking pockets was understood.  The transition gave scope for
+endless ingenuity, and Moll was not slow in mastering the theory
+of either craft.  It was a changing fashion of dress, as I have
+said, which forced a new tactic upon the thief; the pocket was
+invented because the hanging purse was too easy a prey for the
+thievish scissors.  And no sooner did the world conceal its
+wealth in pockets than the cly-filer was born to extract the
+booty with his long, nimble fingers.  The trick was managed with
+an admirable forethought, which has been a constant example to
+after ages.  The file was always accompanied by a bull:, whose
+duty it was to jostle and distract the victim while his pockets
+were rifled.  The bung, or what not, was rapidly passed on to the
+attendant rub, who scurried off before the cry of STOP THIEF! 
+could be raised.
+
+Thus was the craft of thieving practised when Moll was enrolled a
+humble member of the gang.  Yet nature had not endowed her with
+the qualities which ensure an active triumph.  `The best signs
+and marks of a happy, industrious hand,' wrote the hoyden, `is a
+long middle finger, equally suited with that they call the fool's
+or first finger.'  Now, though she was never a clumsy jade, the
+practice of sword-play and quarterstaff had not refined the
+industry of her hands, which were the rather framed for strength
+than for delicacy.  So that though she served a willing
+apprenticeship, and eagerly shared the risks of her chosen
+trade, the fear of Newgate and Tyburn weighed heavily upon her
+spirit, and she cast about her for a method of escape.  Avoiding
+the danger of discovery, she was loth to forego her just profit,
+and hoped that intelligence might atone for her sturdy, inactive
+fingers.  Already she had endeared herself to the gang by
+unnumbered acts of kindness and generosity; already her
+inflexible justice had made her umpire in many a difficult
+dispute.  If a rascal could be bought off at the gallows' foot,
+there was Moll with an open purse; and so speedily did she
+penetrate all the secrets of thievish policy, that her counsel
+and comfort were soon indispensable.
+
+Here, then, was her opportunity.  Always a diplomatist rather
+than a general, she gave up the battlefield for the council
+chamber.  She planned the robberies which defter hands achieved;
+and, turning herself from cly-filer to fence, she received and
+changed to money all the watches and trinkets stolen by the gang.
+
+Were a citizen robbed upon the highway, he straightway betook
+himself to Moll, and his property was presently returned him at a
+handsome price.  Her house, in short, became a brokery.  Hither
+the blades and divers brought their purchases, and sought the
+ransom; hither came the outraged victims to buy again the jewels
+and rings which thievish fingers had pinched.  With prosperity
+her method improved, until at last her statesmanship controlled
+the remotest details of the craft.  Did one of her gang get to
+work overnight and carry off a wealthy swag, she had due
+intelligence of the affair betimes next morning, so that,
+furnished with an inventory of the booty, she might make a just
+division, or be prepared for the advent of the rightful owner.
+
+So she gained a complete ascendency over her fellows.  And when
+once her position was assured, she came forth a pitiless
+autocrat.  Henceforth the gang existed for her pleasure, not she
+for the gang's; and she was as urgent to punish insubordination
+as is an empress to avenge the heinous sin of treason.  The
+pickpocket who had claimed her protection knew no more the
+delight of freedom.  If he dared conceal the booty that was his,
+he had an enemy more powerful than the law, and many a time did
+contumacy pay the last penalty at the gallows.  But the faithful
+also had their reward, for Moll never deserted a comrade, and
+while she lived in perfect safety herself she knew well how to
+contrive the safety of others.  Nor was she content merely to
+discharge those duties of the fence for which an instinct of
+statecraft designed her.  Her restless brain seethed with plans
+of plunder, and if her hands were idle it was her direction that
+emptied half the pockets in London.  Having drilled her army of
+divers to an unparalleled activity, she cast about for some fresh
+method of warfare, and so enrolled a regiment of heavers, who
+would lurk at the mercers' doors for an opportunity to carry off
+ledgers and account-books.  The price of redemption was fixed
+by Moll herself, and until the mercers were aroused by
+frequent losses to a quicker vigilance, the trade was profitably
+secure.
+
+Meanwhile new clients were ever seeking her aid, and, already
+empress of the thieves, she presently aspired to the friendship
+and patronage of the highwaymen.  Though she did not dispose of
+their booty, she was appointed their banker, and vast was the
+treasure entrusted to the coffers of honest Moll.  Now, it was
+her pride to keep only the best company, for she hated stupidity
+worse than a clumsy hand, and they were men of wit and spirit who
+frequented her house.  Thither came the famous Captain Hind, the
+Regicides' inveterate enemy, whose lofty achievements Moll, with
+an amiable extravagance, was wont to claim for her own.  Thither
+came the unamiably notorious Mull Sack, who once emptied
+Cromwell's pocket on the Mall, and whose courage was as
+formidable as his rough-edged tongue.  Another favourite was the
+ingenious Crowder, whose humour it was to take the road habited
+like a bishop, and who surprised the victims of his greed with
+ghostly counsel.  Thus it was a merry party that assembled in the
+lady's parlour, loyal to the memory of the martyred king, and
+quick to fling back an offending pleasantry.
+
+But the house in Fleet Street was a refuge as well as a resort,
+the sanctuary of a hundred rascals, whose misdeeds were not too
+flagrantly discovered.  For, while Moll always allowed discretion
+to govern her conduct, while she would risk no present
+security for a vague promise of advantages to come, her secret
+influence in Newgate made her more powerful than the hangman and
+the whole bench of judges.  There was no turnkey who was not her
+devoted servitor, but it was the clerk of Newgate to whom she and
+her family were most deeply beholden.  This was one Ralph
+Briscoe, as pretty a fellow as ever deserted the law for a bull-
+baiting.  Though wizened and clerkly in appearance, he was of a
+lofty courage; and Moll was heard to declare that had she not
+been sworn to celibacy, she would have cast an eye upon the
+faithful Ralph, who was obedient to her behests whether at Gaol
+Delivery or Bear Garden.  For her he would pack a jury or get a
+reprieve; for him she would bait a bull with the fiercest dogs in
+London.  Why then should she fear the law, when the clerk of
+Newgate and Gregory the Hangman fought upon her side?
+
+For others the arbiter of life and death, she was only thrice in
+an unexampled career confronted with the law.  Her first occasion
+of arrest was so paltry that it brought discredit only on the
+constable.  This jack-in-office, a very Dogberry, encountered
+Moll returning down Ludgate Hill from some merry-making, a
+lanthorn carried pompously before her.  Startled by her attire he
+questioned her closely, and receiving insult for answer, promptly
+carried her to the Round House.  The customary garnish made her
+free or the prison, and next morning a brief interview with
+the Lord Mayor restored Moll to liberty but not to forgetfulness.
+
+She had yet to wreak her vengeance upon the constable for a
+monstrous affront, and hearing presently that he had a rich uncle
+in Shropshire, she killed the old gentleman (in imagination) and
+made the constable his heir.  Instantly a retainer, in the true
+garb and accent of the country, carried the news to Dogberry, and
+sent him off to Ludlow on the costliest of fool's errands.  He
+purchased a horse and set forth joyously, as became a man of
+property; he limped home, broken in purse and spirit, the hapless
+object of ridicule and contempt.  Perhaps he guessed the author
+of this sprightly outrage; but Moll, for her part, was far too
+finished a humorist to reveal the truth, and hereafter she was
+content to swell the jesting chorus.
+
+Her second encounter with justice was no mere pleasantry, and it
+was only her marvellous generalship that snatched her career from
+untimely ruin and herself from the clutch of Master Gregory.  Two
+of her emissaries had encountered a farmer in Chancery Lane. 
+They spoke with him first at Smithfield, and knew that his pocket
+was well lined with bank-notes.  An improvised quarrel at a
+tavern-door threw the farmer off his guard, and though he
+defended the money, his watch was snatched from his fob and duly
+carried to Moll.  The next day the victim, anxious to repurchase
+his watch, repaired to Fleet Street, where Moll generously
+promised to recover the stolen property.  Unhappily security
+had encouraged recklessness, and as the farmer turned to leave he
+espied his own watch hanging among other trinkets upon the wall. 
+With a rare discretion he held his peace until he had called a
+constable to his aid, and this time the Roaring Girl was lodged
+in Newgate, with an ugly crime laid to her charge.
+
+Committed for trial, she demanded that the watch should be left
+in the constable's keeping, and, pleading not guilty when the
+sessions came round, insisted that her watch and the farmer's
+were not the same.  The farmer, anxious to acknowledge his
+property, demanded the constable to deliver the watch, that it
+might be sworn to in open court; and when the constable put his
+hand to his pocket the only piece of damning evidence had
+vanished, stolen by the nimble fingers of one of Moll's officers.
+
+Thus with admirable trickery and a perfect sense of dramatic
+effect she contrived her escape, and never again ran the risk of
+a sudden discovery.  For experience brought caution in its train,
+and though this wiliest of fences lived almost within the shadow
+of Newgate, though she was as familiar in the prison yard as at
+the Globe Tavern, her nightly resort, she obeyed the rules of
+life and law with so precise an exactitude that suspicion could
+never fasten upon her.  Her kingdom was midway between robbery
+and justice.  And as she controlled the mystery of thieving so,
+in reality, she meted out punishment to the evildoer.  Honest
+citizens were robbed with small risk to life or property. 
+For Moll always frowned upon violence, and was ever ready to
+restore the booty for a fair ransom.  And the thieves, driven by
+discipline to a certain humanity, plied their trade with an
+obedience and orderliness hitherto unknown.  Moll's then was no
+mean achievement.  Her career was not circumscribed by her trade,
+and the Roaring Girl, the daredevil companion of the wits and
+bloods, enjoyed a fame no less glorious than the Queen of
+Thieves.
+
+`Enter Moll in a frieze jerkin and a black safeguard.'  Thus in
+the old comedy she comes upon the stage; and truly it was by her
+clothes that she was first notorious.  By accident a woman, by
+habit a man, she must needs invent a costume proper to her
+pursuits.  But she was no shrieking reformer, no fanatic spying
+regeneration in a pair of breeches.  Only in her attire she
+showed her wit; and she went to a bull-baiting in such a dress as
+well became her favourite sport.  She was not of those who `walk
+in spurs but never ride.'  The jerkin, the doublet, the
+galligaskins were put on to serve the practical purposes of life,
+not to attract the policeman or the spinster.  And when a
+petticoat spread its ample folds beneath the doublet, not only
+was her array handsome, but it symbolised the career of one who
+was neither man nor woman, and yet both.  After a while, however,
+the petticoat seemed too tame for her stalwart temper, and she
+exchanged it for the great Dutch slop, habited in which unseemly
+garment she is pictured in the ancient prints.
+
+
+Up and down the town she romped and scolded, earning the name
+which Middleton gave her in her green girlhood.  `She has the
+spirit of four great parishes,' says the wit in the comedy, `and
+a voice that will drown all the city.'  If a gallant stood in the
+way, she drew upon him in an instant, and he must be a clever
+swordsman to hold his ground against the tomboy who had laid low
+the German fencer himself.  A good fellow always, she had ever a
+merry word for the passer-by, and so sharp was her tongue that
+none ever put a trick upon her.  Not to know Moll was to be
+inglorious, and she `slipped from one company to another like a
+fat eel between a Dutchman's fingers.'  Now at Parker's Ordinary,
+now at the Bear Garden, she frequented only the haunts of men,
+and not until old age came upon her did she endure patiently the
+presence of women.
+
+Her voice and speech were suited to the galligaskin.  She was a
+true disciple of Maltre Fran<c,>ois, hating nothing so much as
+mincing obscenity, and if she flavoured her discourse with many a
+blasphemous quip, the blasphemy was `not so malicious as
+customary.'  Like the blood she was, she loved good ale and wine;
+and she regarded it among her proudest titles to renown that she
+was the first of women to smoke tobacco.  Many was the pound of
+best Virginian that she bought of Mistress Gallipot, and the
+pipe, with monkey, dog, and eagle, is her constant emblem.  Her
+antic attire, the fearless courage of her pranks, now and again
+involved her in disgrace or even jeopardised her freedom; but
+her unchanging gaiety made light of disaster, and still she
+laughed and rollicked in defiance of prude and pedant.
+
+Her companion in many a fantastical adventure was Banks, the
+vintner of Cheapside, that same Banks who taught his horse to
+dance and shod him with silver.  Now once upon a time a right
+witty sport was devised between them.  The vintner bet Moll
+<Pd>20 that she would not ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch
+astraddle on horseback, in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs.
+
+The hoyden took him up in a moment, and added of her own devilry
+a trumpet and banner.  She set out from Charing Cross bravely
+enough, and a trumpeter being an unwonted spectacle, the eyes of
+all the town were clapped upon her.  Yet none knew her until she
+reached Bishopsgate, where an orange-wench set up the cry, `Moll
+Cutpurse on horseback!'  Instantly the cavalier was surrounded by
+a noisy mob.  Some would have torn her from the saddle for an
+imagined insult upon womanhood, others, more wisely minded,
+laughed at the prank with good-humoured merriment.  Every minute
+the throng grew denser, and it had fared hardly with roystering
+Moll, had not a wedding and the arrest of a debtor presently
+distracted the gaping idlers.  As the mob turned to gaze at the
+fresh wonder, she spurred her horse until she gained Newington by
+an unfrequented lane.  There she waited until night should cover
+her progress to Shoreditch, and thus peacefully she returned
+home to lighten the vintner's pocket of twenty pounds.
+
+The fame of the adventure spread abroad, and that the scandal
+should not be repeated Moll was summoned before the Court of
+Arches to answer a charge of appearing publicly in mannish
+apparel.  The august tribunal had no terror for her, and she
+received her sentence to do penance in a white sheet at Paul's
+Cross during morning-service on a Sunday with an audacious
+contempt.  `They might as well have shamed a black dog as me,'
+she proudly exclaimed; and why should she dread the white sheet,
+when all the spectators looked with a lenient eye upon her
+professed discomfiture?'  For a halfpenny,' she said, `she would
+have travelled to every market-town of England in the guise of a
+penitent,' and having tippled off three quarts of sack she
+swaggered to Paul's Cross in the maddest of humours.  But not all
+the courts on earth could lengthen her petticoat, or contract the
+Dutch slop by a single fold.  For a while, perhaps, she chastened
+her costume, yet she soon reverted to the ancient mode, and to
+her dying day went habited as a man.
+
+As bear baiting was the passion of her life, so she was
+scrupulous in the care and training of her dogs.  She gave them
+each a trundle-bed, wrapping them from the cold in sheets and
+blankets, while their food would not have dishonoured a
+gentleman's table.  Parrots, too, gave a sense of colour and
+companionship to her house; and it was in this love of pets,
+and her devotion to cleanliness, that she showed a trace of
+dormant womanhood.  Abroad a ribald and a scold, at home she was
+the neatest of housewives, and her parlour, with its mirrors and
+its manifold ornaments, was the envy of the neighbours.  So her
+trade flourished, and she lived a life of comfort, of plenty
+even, until the Civil War threw her out of work.  When an
+unnatural conflict set the whole country at loggerheads, what
+occasion was there for the honest prig?  And it is not surprising
+that, like all the gentlemen adventurers of the age, Moll
+remained most stubbornly loyal to the King's cause.  She made the
+conduit in Fleet Street run with wine when Charles came to London
+in 1638; and it was her amiable pleasantry to give the name of
+Strafford to a clever, cunning bull, and to dub the dogs that
+assailed him Pym, Hampden, and the rest, that right heartily she
+might applaud the courage of Strafford as he threw off his unwary
+assailants.
+
+So long as the quarrel lasted, she was compelled to follow a
+profession more ancient than the fence's; for there is one
+passion which war itself cannot extinguish.  When once the King
+had laid his head `down as upon a bed,' when once the Protector
+had proclaimed his supremacy, the industry of the road revived;
+and there was not a single diver or rumpad that did not declare
+eternal war upon the black-hearted Regicides.  With a laudable
+devotion to her chosen cause, Moll despatched the most
+experienced of her gang to rob Lady Fairfax on her way to
+church; and there is a tradition that the Roaring Girl,
+hearing that Fairfax himself would pass by Hounslow, rode forth
+to meet him, and with her own voice bade him stand and deliver. 
+One would like to believe it; yet it is scarce credible.  If
+Fairfax had spent the balance of an ignominious career in being
+plundered by a band of loyal brigands, he would not have had time
+to justify the innumerable legends of pockets emptied and pistols
+levelled at his head.  Moreover, Moll herself was laden with
+years, and she had always preferred the council chamber to the
+battlefield.  But it is certain that, with Captain Hind and Mull
+Sack to aid, she schemed many a clever plot against the
+Roundheads, and nobly she played her part in avenging the
+martyred King.
+
+Thus she declined into old age, attended, like Queen Mary, by her
+maids, who would card, reel, spin, and beguile her leisure with
+sweet singing.  Though her spirit was untamed, the burden of her
+years compelled her to a tranquil life.  She, who formerly never
+missed a bull-baiting, must now content herself with tick-tack. 
+Her fortune, moreover, had been wrecked in the Civil War.  Though
+silver shells still jingled in her pocket, time was she knew the
+rattle of the yellow boys.  But she never lost courage, and died
+at last of a dropsy, in placid contentment with her lot. 
+Assuredly she was born at a time well suited to her genius.  Had
+she lived to-day, she might have been a `Pioneer'; she might even
+have discussed some paltry problem of sex in a printed obscenity.
+
+In her own freer, wiser age, she was not man's detractor, but
+his rival; and if she never knew the passion of love, she was
+always loyal to the obligation of friendship.  By her will she
+left twenty pounds to celebrate the Second Charles's restoration
+to his kingdom; and you contemplate her career with the single
+regret that she died a brief year before the red wine, thus
+generously bestowed, bubbled at the fountain.
+
+
+II
+JONATHAN WILD
+
+
+JONATHAN WILD
+
+WHEN Jonathan Wild and the Count La Ruse, in Fielding's
+narrative, took a hand at cards, Jonathan picked his opponent's
+pocket, though he knew it was empty, while the Count, from sheer
+force of habit, stacked the cards, though Wild had not a farthing
+to lose.  And if in his uncultured youth the great man stooped to
+prig with his own hand, he was early cured of the weakness: so
+that Fielding's picture of the hero taking a bottle-screw from
+the Ordinary's pocket in the very moment of death is entirely
+fanciful.  For `this Machiavel of Thieves,' as a contemporary
+styled him, left others to accomplish what his ingenuity had
+planned.  His was the high policy of theft.  If he lived on terms
+of familiar intimacy with the mill-kens, the bridle-culls, the
+buttock-and-files of London, he was none the less the friend and
+minister of justice.  He enjoyed the freedom of Newgate and the
+Old Bailey.  He came and went as he liked: he packed juries, he
+procured bail, he manufactured evidence; and there was scarce an
+assize or a sessions passed but he slew his man.
+
+The world knew him for a robber, yet could not refuse his
+brilliant service.  At the Poultry Counter, you are told, he laid
+the foundations of his future greatness, and to the Poultry
+Counter he was committed for some trifling debt ere he had fully
+served his apprenticeship to the art and mystery of buckle-
+making.  There he learned his craft, and at his enlargement he
+was able forthwith to commence thief-catcher.  His plan was
+conceived with an effrontery that was nothing less than genius. 
+On the one side he was the factor, or rather the tyrant, of the
+cross-coves: on the other he was the trusted agent of justice,
+the benefactor of the outraged and the plundered.  Among his
+earliest exploits was the recovery of the Countess of G--d--n's
+chair, impudently carried off when her ladyship had but just
+alighted; and the courage wherewith he brought to justice the
+murderers of one Mrs. Knap, who had been slain for some trifling
+booty, established his reputation as upon a rock.  He at once
+advertised himself in the public prints as Thief-Catcher General
+of Great Britain and Ireland, and proceeded to send to the
+gallows every scoundrel that dared dispute his position.
+
+His opportunities of gain were infinite.  Even if he did not
+organise the robbery which his cunning was presently to discover,
+he had spies in every hole and corner to set him on the felon's
+track.  Nor did he leave a single enterprise to chance:  `He
+divided the city and suburbs into wards or divisions, and
+appointed the persons who were to attend each ward, and kept them
+strictly to their duty.'  If a subordinate dared to disobey
+or to shrink from murder, Jonathan hanged him at the next assize,
+and happily for him he had not a single confederate whose neck he
+might not put in the halter when he chose.  Thus he preserved the
+union and the fidelity of his gang, punishing by judicial murder
+the smallest insubordination, the faintest suspicion of rivalry. 
+Even when he had shut his victim up in Newgate, he did not leave
+him so long as there was a chance of blackmail.  He would make
+the most generous offers of evidence and defence to every thief
+that had a stiver left him.  But whether or not he kept his
+bargain--that depended upon policy and inclination.  On one
+occasion, when he had brought a friend to the Old Bailey, and
+relented at the last moment, he kept the prosecutor drunk from
+the noble motive of self-interest, until the case was over.  And
+so esteemed was he of the officers of the law that even this
+interference did but procure a reprimand.
+
+His meanest action marked him out from his fellows, but it was
+not until he habitually pillaged the treasures he afterwards
+restored to their grateful owners for a handsome consideration,
+that his art reached the highest point of excellence.  The event
+was managed by him with amazing adroitness from beginning to end.
+
+It was he who discovered the wealth and habit of the victim; it
+was he who posted the thief and seized the plunder, giving a
+paltry commission to his hirelings for the trouble; it was he who
+kept whatever valuables were lost in the transaction; and as he
+was the servant of the Court, discovery or inconvenience was
+impossible.  Surely the Machiavel of Thieves is justified of his
+title.  He was known to all the rich and titled folk in town; and
+if he was generally able to give them back their stolen valuables
+at something more than double their value, he treated his clients
+with a most proper insolence.  When Lady M--n was unlucky enough
+to lose a silver buckle at Windsor, she asked Wild to recover it,
+and offered the hero twenty pounds for his trouble.  `Zounds,
+Madam,' says he, `you offer nothing.  It cost the gentleman who
+took it forty pounds for his coach, equipage, and other expenses
+to Windsor.'  His impudence increased with success, and in the
+geniality of his cups he was wont to boast his amazing rogueries:
+`hinting not without vanity at the poor Understandings of the
+Greatest Part of Mankind, and his own Superior Cunning.'
+
+In fifteen years he claimed <Pd>10,000 for his dividend of
+recovered plunderings, and who shall estimate the moneys which
+flowed to his treasury from blackmail and the robberies of his
+gang?  So brisk became his trade in jewels and the precious
+metals that he opened relations with Holland, and was master of a
+fleet.  His splendour increased with wealth: he carried a silver-
+mounted sword, and a footman tramped at his heels.  `His table
+was very splendid,' says a biographer: `he seldom dining under
+five Dishes, the Reversions whereof were generally charitably
+bestow'd on the Commonside felons.'  At his second marriage with
+Mrs. Mary D--n, the hempen widow of Scull D--n, his humour
+was most happily expressed: he distributed white ribbons among
+the turnkeys, he gave the Ordinary gloves and favours, he sent
+the prisoners of Newgate several ankers of brandy for punch. 
+`Twas a fitting complaisance, since his fortune was drawn from
+Newgate, and since he was destined himself, a few years later, to
+drink punch--`a liquor nowhere spoken against in the
+Scriptures'--with the same Ordinary whom he thus magnificently
+decorated.  Endowed with considerable courage, for a while he had
+the prudence to save his skin, and despite his bravado he was
+known on occasion to yield a plundered treasure to an accomplice
+who set a pistol to his head.  But it is certain that the
+accomplice died at Tyburn for his pains, and on equal terms
+Jonathan was resolute with the best.  On the trail he was savage
+as a wild beast.  When he arrested James Wright for a robbery
+committed upon the persons of the Earl of B--l--n and the Lord
+Bruce, he held on to the victim's chin by his teeth--an exploit
+which reminds you of the illustrious Tiger Roche.
+
+Even in his lifetime he was generously styled the Great.  The
+scourge of London, he betrayed and destroyed every man that ever
+dared to live upon terms of friendship with him.  It was Jonathan
+that made Blueskin a thief, and Jonathan screened his creature
+from justice only so long as clemency seemed profitable.  At the
+first hint of disobedience Blueskin was committed to Newgate. 
+When he had stood his trial, and was being taken to the Condemned
+Hole, he beckoned to Wild as though to a conference, and cut
+his throat with a penknife.  The assembled rogues and turnkeys
+thought their Jonathan dead at last, and rejoiced exceedingly
+therein.  Straightway the poet of Newgate's Garland leaped into
+verse:
+
+          Then hopeless of life,
+          He drew his penknife,
+          And made a sad widow of Jonathan's wife.
+     But forty pounds paid her, her grief shall appease,
+     And every man round me may rob, if he please.
+
+But Jonathan recovered, and Molly, his wife, was destined a
+second time to win the conspicuous honour that belongs to a
+hempen widow.
+
+As his career drew to its appointed close, Fortune withheld her
+smiles.  `People got so peery,' complained the great man, `that
+ingenious men were put to dreadful shifts.'  And then, highest
+tribute to his greatness, an Act of Parliament was passed which
+made it a capital offence `for a prig to steal with the hands of
+other people'; and in the increase of public vigilance his
+undoing became certain.  On the 2nd of January, 1725, a day not
+easy to forget, a creature of Wild's spoke with fifty yards of
+lace, worth <Pd>40, at his Captain's bidding, and Wild, having
+otherwise disposed of the plunder, was charged on the 10th of
+March that he `did feloniously receive of Katharine Stetham ten
+guineas on account and under colour of helping the said Katharine
+Stetham to the said lace again, and did not then, nor any time
+since, discover or apprehend, or cause to be apprehended and
+brought to Justice, the persons that committed the said felony.' 
+Thus runs the indictment, and, to the inexpressible relief of
+lesser men, Jonathan Wild was condemned to the gallows.
+
+Thereupon he had serious thoughts of `putting his house in
+order'; with an ironical smile he demanded an explanation of the
+text:  `Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree'; but,
+presently reflecting that `his Time was but short in this World,
+he improved it to the best advantage in Eating, Drinking,
+Swearing, Cursing, and talking to his Visitants.'  For all his
+bragging, drink alone preserved his courage: `he was very
+restless in the Condemned Hole,' though `he gave little or no
+attention to the condemned Sermon which the purblind Ordinary
+preached before him,' and which was, in Fielding's immortal
+phrase, `unto the Greeks foolishness.'  But in the moment of
+death his distinction returned to him.  He tried, and failed, to
+kill himself; and his progress to the nubbing cheat was a triumph
+of execration.  He reached Tyburn through a howling mob, and died
+to a yell of universal joy.
+
+The Ordinary has left a record so precious and so lying, that it
+must needs be quoted at length.  The great Thief-Catcher's
+confession is a masterpiece of comfort, and is so far removed
+from the truth as completely to justify Fielding's incomparable
+creation.  `Finding there was no room for mercy (and how could I
+expect mercy, who never showed any)'--thus does the devil
+dodger dishonour our Jonathan's memory!--`as soon as I came into
+the Condemned Hole, I began to think of making a preparation for
+my soul. . . .  To part with my wife, my dear Molly, is so great
+an Affliction to me, that it touches me to the Quick, and is like
+Daggers entering into my Heart.'  How tame the Ordinary's
+falsehood to the brilliant invention of Fielding, who makes
+Jonathan kick his Tishy in the very shadow of the Tree!  And the
+Reverend Gentleman gains in unction as he goes:  `In the Cart
+they all kneeled down to prayers and seemed very penitent; the
+Ordinary used all the means imaginable to make them think of
+another World, and after singing a penitential Psalm, they cry'd
+Lord Jesus Christ receive our Souls, the cart drew away and they
+were all turned off.  This is as good an account as can be given
+by me.'  Poor Ordinary!  If he was modest, he was also
+untruthful, and you are certain that it was not thus the hero met
+his death.
+
+Even had Fielding never written his masterpiece, Jonathan Wild
+would still have been surnamed `The Great.'  For scarce a chap-
+book appeared in the year of Jonathan's death that did not expose
+the only right and true view of his character.  `His business,'
+says one hack of prison literature, `at all times was to put a
+false gloss upon things, and to make fools of mankind.'  Another
+precisely formulates the theory of greatness insisted upon by
+Fielding with so lavish an irony and so masterly a wit.  While it
+is certain that The History of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild is as
+noble a piece of irony as literature can show, while for the
+qualities of wit and candour it is equal to its motive, it is
+likewise true that therein you meet the indubitable Jonathan
+Wild.  It is an entertainment to compare the chap-books of the
+time with the reasoned, finished work of art: not in any spirit
+of pedantry--since accuracy in these matters is of small account,
+but with intent to show how doubly fortunate Fielding was in his
+genius and in his material.  Of course the writer rejoiced in the
+aid of imagination and eloquence; of course he embellished his
+picture with such inspirations as Miss Laetitia and the Count; of
+course he preserves from the first page to the last the highest
+level of unrivalled irony.  But the sketch was there before him,
+and a lawyer's clerk had treated Jonathan in a vein of heroism
+within a few weeks of his death.  And since a plain statement is
+never so true as fiction, Fielding's romance is still more
+credible, still convinces with an easier effort, than the serious
+and pedestrian records of contemporaries.  Nor can you return to
+its pages without realising that, so far from being `the
+evolution of a purely intellectual conception,' Jonathan Wild
+is a magnificently idealised and ironical portrait of a great
+man.
+
+
+
+III
+A PARALLEL
+
+(MOLL CUTPURSE AND
+JONATHAN WILD)
+
+
+
+A PARALLEL
+
+(MOLL CUTPURSE AND JONATHAN WILD)
+
+THEY plied the same trade, each with incomparable success.  By
+her, as by him, the art of the fence was carried to its ultimate
+perfection.  In their hands the high policy of theft wanted nor
+dignity nor assurance.  Neither harboured a single scheme which
+was not straightway translated into action, and they were masters
+at once of Newgate and the Highway.  As none might rob without
+the encouragement of his emperor, so none was hanged at Tyburn
+while intrigue or bribery might avail to drag a half-doomed neck
+from the halter; and not even Moll herself was more bitterly
+tyrannical in the control of a reckless gang than the thin-jawed,
+hatchet-faced Jonathan Wild.
+
+They were statesmen rather than warriors--happy if they might
+direct the enterprises of others, and determined to punish the
+lightest disobedience by death.  The mind of each was readier
+than his right arm, and neither would risk an easy advantage by a
+misunderstood or unwonted sleight of hand.  But when you
+leave the exercise of their craft to contemplate their character
+with a larger eye, it is the woman who at every point has the
+advantage.  Not only was she the peerless inventor of a new
+cunning; she was at home (and abroad) the better fellow.  The
+suppression of sex was in itself an unparalleled triumph, and the
+most envious detractor could not but marvel at the domination of
+her womanhood.  Moreover, she shone in a gayer, more splendid
+epoch.  The worthy contemporary of Shakespeare, she had small
+difficulty in performing feats of prowess and resource which
+daunted the intrepid ruffians of the eighteenth century.  Her
+period, in brief, gave her an eternal superiority; and it were as
+hopeless for Otway to surpass the master whom he disgraced, as
+for Wild to o'ershadow the brilliant example of Moll Cutpurse.
+
+Tyrants both, they exercised their sovereignty in accordance with
+their varying temperament.  Hers was a fine, fat, Falstaffian
+humour, which, while it inspired Middleton, might have suggested
+to Shakespeare an equal companion of the drunken knight.  His was
+but a narrow, cynic wit, not edged like the knife, which wellnigh
+cut his throat, but blunt and scratching like a worn-toothed saw.
+
+She laughed with a laugh that echoed from Ludgate to Charing
+Cross, and her voice drowned all the City.  He grinned rarely and
+with malice; he piped in a voice shrill and acid as the tricks of
+his mischievous imagination.  She knew no cruelty beyond the
+necessities of her life, and none regretted more than she the
+inevitable death of a traitor.  He lusted after destruction with
+a fiendish temper, which was a grim anticipation of De Sade; he
+would even smile as he saw the noose tighten round the necks of
+the poor innocents he had beguiled to Tyburn.  It was his boast
+that he had contrived robberies for the mere glory of dragging
+his silly victims to the gallows.  But Moll, though she stood
+half-way between the robber and his prey, would have sacrificed a
+hundred well-earned commissions rather than see her friends and
+comrades strangled.  Her temperament compelled her to the loyal
+support of her own order, and she would have shrunk in horror
+from her rival, who, for all his assumed friendship with the
+thief, was a staunch and subtle ally of justice.
+
+Before all things she had the genius of success.  Her public
+offences were trivial and condoned.  She died in her bed, full of
+years and of honours, beloved by the light-fingered gentry,
+reverenced by all the judges on the bench.  He, for all the
+sacrifices he made to a squint-eyed law, died execrated alike by
+populace and police.  Already Blueskin had done his worst with a
+pen-knife; already Jack Sheppard and his comrades had warned
+Drury Lane against the infamous thief-catcher.  And so anxious,
+on the other hand, was the law to be quit of their too zealous
+servant, that an Act of Parliament was passed with the sole
+object of placing Jonathan's head within the noose.  His
+method, meagre though masterly, lulled him too soon to an
+impotent security.  She, with her larger view of life, her
+plumper sense of style, was content with nothing less than an
+ultimate sovereignty, and manifestly did she prove her
+superiority.
+
+Though born for the wimple, she was more of a man than the
+breeched and stockinged Jonathan, whose only deed of valiance was
+to hang, terrier-like, by his teeth to an evasive enemy.  While
+he cheated at cards and cogged the dice, she trained dogs and
+never missed a bear-baiting.  He shrank, like the coward that he
+was, from the exercise of manly sports; she cared not what were
+the weapons--quarterstaff or broadsword--so long as she
+vanquished her opponent.  She scoured the town in search of
+insult; he did but exert his cunning when a quarrel was put upon
+him.  Who, then, shall deny her manhood?  Who shall whisper that
+his style was the braver or the better suited to his sex?
+
+As became a hero, she kept the best of loose company: her parlour
+was ever packed with the friends of loyalty and adventure.  Are
+not Hind and Mull Sack worth a thousand Blueskins?  Moreover,
+plunder and wealth were not the only objects of her pursuit: she
+was not merely a fence but a patriot, and she would have
+accounted a thousand pounds well lost, if she did but compass the
+discomfiture of a Parliament-man.  Indeed, if Jonathan, the
+thief-catcher, limped painfully after his magnificent
+example, Jonathan the man and the sportsman confessed a pitiful
+inferiority to the valiant Moll.  Thus she avenged her sex by
+distancing the most illustrious of her rivals; and if he pleads
+for his credit a taste for theology, hers is the chuckle of
+contemptuous superiority.  She died a patriot, bequeathing a
+fountain of wine to the champions of an exiled king; he died a
+casuist, setting crabbed problems to the Ordinary.  Here, again,
+the advantage is evident: loyalty is the virtue of men; a sudden
+attachment to religion is the last resource of the second-rate
+citizen and of the trapped criminal.
+
+
+
+RALPH BRISCOE
+
+
+RALPH BRISCOE
+
+A SPARE, lean frame; a small head set forward upon a pair of
+sloping shoulders; a thin, sharp nose, and rat-like eyes; a flat,
+hollow chest; shrunk shanks, modestly retreating from their
+snuff-coloured hose--these are the tokens which served to remind
+his friends of Ralph Briscoe, the Clerk of Newgate.  As he left
+the prison in the grey air of morning upon some errand of mercy
+or revenge, he appeared the least fearsome of mortals, while an
+awkward limp upon his left toe deepened the impression of
+timidity.  So abstract was his manner, so hesitant his gait, that
+he would hug the wall as he went, nervously stroking its grimy
+surface with his long, twittering fingers.  But Ralph, as justice
+and the Jug knew too well, was neither fool nor coward.  His
+character belied his outward seeming.  A large soul had crept
+into the case of his wizened body, and if a poltroon among his
+ancestors had gifted him with an alien type, he had inherited
+from some nameless warrior both courage and resource.
+
+He was born in easy circumstances, and gently nurtured in the
+distant village of Kensington.  Though cast in a scholar's
+mould, and very apt for learning, he rebelled from the outset
+against a career of inaction.  His lack of strength was never a
+check upon his high stomach; he would fight with boys of twice
+his size, and accept the certain defeat in a cheerful spirit of
+dogged pugnacity.  Moreover, if his arms were weak, his cunning
+was as keen-edged as his tongue; and, before his stricken eye had
+paled, he had commonly executed an ample vengeance upon his
+enemy.  Nor was it industry that placed him at the top of the
+class.  A ready wit made him master of the knowledge he despised.
+
+But he would always desert his primer to follow the hangman's
+lumbering cart up Tyburn Hill, and, still a mere imp of mischief,
+he would run the weary way from Kensington to Shoe Lane on the
+distant chance of a cock-fight.  He was present, so he would
+relate in after years, when Sir Thomas Jermin's man put his
+famous trick upon the pit.  With a hundred pounds in his pocket
+and under his arm a dunghill cock, neatly trimmed for the fray,
+the ingenious ruffian, as Briscoe would tell you, went off to
+Shoe Lane, persuaded an accomplice to fight the cock in Sir
+Thomas Jermin's name, and laid a level hundred against his own
+bird.  So lofty was Sir Thomas's repute that backers were easily
+found, but the dunghill rooster instantly showed a clean pair of
+heels, and the cheat was justified of his cunning.
+
+Thus Ralph Briscoe learnt the first lessons in that art of
+sharping wherein he was afterwards an adept; and when he
+left school his head was packed with many a profitable device
+which no book learning could impart.  His father, however, still
+resolute that he should join an intelligent profession, sent him
+to Gray's Inn that he might study law.  Here the elegance of his
+handwriting gained him a rapid repute; his skill became the envy
+of all the lean-souled clerks in the Inn, and he might have died
+a respectable attorney had not the instinct of sport forced him
+from the inkpot and parchment of his profession.  Ill could he
+tolerate the monotony and restraint of this clerkly life.  In his
+eyes law was an instrument, not of justice, but of jugglery.  Men
+were born, said his philosophy, rather to risk their necks than
+ink their fingers; and if a bold adventure puts you in a
+difficulty, why, then, you hire some straw-splitting attorney to
+show his cunning.  Indeed, the study of law was for him, as it
+was for Falstaff, an excuse for many a bout and merry-making.  He
+loved his glass, and he loved his wench, and he loved a bull-
+baiting better than either.  It was his boast, and Moll
+Cutpurse's compliment, that he never missed a match in his life,
+and assuredly no man was better known in Paris Garden than the
+intrepid Ralph Briscoe.
+
+The cloistered seclusion of Gray's Inn grew daily more irksome. 
+There he would sit, in mute despair, drumming the table with his
+fingers, and biting the quill, whose use he so bitterly
+contemned.  Of winter afternoons he would stare through the
+leaded window-panes at the gaunt, leafless trees, on whose
+summits swayed the cawing rooks, until servitude seemed
+intolerable, and he prayed for the voice of the bearward that
+summoned him to Southwark.  And when the chained bear, the
+familiar monkey on his back, followed the shrill bagpipe along
+the curious street, Briscoe felt that blood, not ink, coursed in
+his veins, forgot the tiresome impediment of the law, and joined
+the throng, hungry for this sport of kings.  Nor was he the
+patron of an enterprise wherein he dared take no part.  He was as
+bold and venturesome as the bravest ruffler that ever backed a
+dog at a baiting.  When the bull, cruelly secured behind, met the
+onslaught of his opponents, throwing them off, now this side, now
+that, with his horns, Briscoe, lost in excitement, would leap
+into the ring that not a point of the combat should escape him.
+
+So it was that he won the friendship of his illustrious
+benefactress, Moll Cutpurse.  For, one day, when he had ventured
+too near the maddened bull, the brute made a heave at his
+breeches, which instantly gave way; and in another moment he
+would have been gored to death, had not Moll seized him by the
+collar and slung him out of the ring.  Thus did his courage ever
+contradict his appearance, and at the dangerous game of whipping
+the blinded bear he had no rival, either for bravery or
+adroitness.  He would rush in with uplifted whip until the breath
+of the infuriated beast was hot upon his cheek, let his
+angry lash curl for an instant across the bear's flank, and then,
+for all his halting foot, leap back into safety with a smiling
+pride in his own nimbleness.
+
+His acquaintance with Moll Cutpurse, casually begun at a bull-
+baiting, speedily ripened, for her into friendship, for him into
+love.  In this, the solitary romance of his life, Ralph Briscoe
+overtopped even his own achievements of courage.  The Roaring
+Girl was no more young, and years had not refined her character
+unto gentleness.  It was still her habit to appear publicly in
+jerkin and galligaskins, to smoke tobacco in contempt of her sex,
+and to fight her enemies with a very fury of insolence.  In
+stature she exceeded the limping clerk by a head, and she could
+pick him up with one hand, like a kitten.  Yet he loved her, not
+for any grace of person, nor beauty of feature, nor even because
+her temperament was undaunted as his own.  He loved her for that
+wisest of reasons, which is no reason at all, because he loved
+her.  In his eyes she was the Queen, not of Misrule, but of
+Hearts.  Had a throne been his, she should have shared it, and he
+wooed her with a shy intensity, which ennobled him, even in her
+austere regard.  Alas! she was unable to return his passion, and
+she lamented her own obduracy with characteristic humour.  She
+made no attempt to conceal her admiration.  `A notable and famous
+person,' she called him, confessing that, `he was right for her
+tooth, and made to her mind in every part of him.'  He had been
+bred up in the same exercise of bull-baiting, which was her
+own delight; she had always praised his towardliness, and
+prophesied his preferment.  But when he paid her court she was
+obliged to decline the honour, while she esteemed the compliment.
+
+In truth, she was completely insensible to passion, or, as she
+exclaimed in a phrase of brilliant independence, `I should have
+hired him to my embraces.'
+
+The sole possibility that remained was a Platonic friendship, and
+Briscoe accepted the situation in excellent humour.  `Ever since
+he came to know himself,' again it is Moll that speaks, `he
+always deported himself to me with an abundance of regard,
+calling me his Aunt.'  And his aunt she remained unto the end,
+bound to him in a proper and natural alliance.  Different as they
+were in aspect, they were strangely alike in taste and
+disposition.  Nor was the Paris Garden their only meeting-ground.
+
+His sorry sojourn in Gray's Inn had thrown him on the side of the
+law-breaker, and he had acquired a strange cunning in the
+difficult art of evading justice.  Instantly Moll recognised his
+practical value, and, exerting all her talent for intrigue,
+presently secured for him the Clerkship of Newgate.  Here at last
+he found scope not only for his learning, but for that spirit of
+adventure that breathed within him.  His meagre acquaintance with
+letters placed him on a pinnacle high above his colleagues.  Now
+and then a prisoner proved his equal in wit, but as he was
+manifestly superior in intelligence to the Governor, the
+Ordinary, and all the warders, he speedily seized and
+hereafter retained the real sovereignty of Newgate.
+
+His early progress was barred by envy and contempt.  Why, asked
+the men in possession, should this shrivelled stranger filch our
+privileges?  And Briscoe met their malice with an easy smile,
+knowing that at all points he was more than their match.  His
+alliance with Moll stood him in good stead, and in a few months
+the twain were the supreme arbiters of English justice.  Should a
+highwayman seek to save his neck, he must first pay a fat
+indemnity to the Newgate Clerk, but, since Moll was the appointed
+banker of the whole family, she was quick to sanction whatever
+price her accomplice suggested.  And Briscoe had a hundred other
+tricks whereby he increased his riches and repute.  There was no
+debtor came to Newgate whom the Clerk would not aid, if he
+believed the kindness profitable.  Suppose his inquiries gave an
+assurance of his victim's recovery, he would house him
+comfortably, feed him at his own table, lend him money, and even
+condescend to win back the generous loan by the dice-box.
+
+His civility gave him a general popularity among the prisoners,
+and his appearance in the Yard was a signal for a subdued
+hilarity.  He drank and gambled with the roysterers; he babbled a
+cheap philosophy with the erudite; and he sold the necks of all
+to the highest bidder.  Though now and again he was convicted of
+mercy or revenge, he commonly held himself aloof from human
+passions, and pursued the one sane end of life in an easy
+security.  The hostility of his colleagues irked him but little. 
+A few tags of Latin, the friendship of Moll, and a casual threat
+of exposure frightened the Governor into acquiescence, but the
+Ordinary was more difficult of conciliation.  The Clerk had not
+been long in Newgate before he saw that between the reverend
+gentleman and himself there could be naught save war.  Hitherto
+the Ordinary had reserved to his own profit the right of
+intrigue; he it was who had received the hard-scraped money of
+the sorrowing relatives, and untied the noose when it seemed good
+to him.  Briscoe insisted upon a division of labour.  `It is your
+business,' he said, `to save the scoundrels in the other world. 
+Leave to me the profit of their salvation in this.'  And the
+Clerk triumphed after his wont: freedom jingled in his pocket; he
+doled out comfort, even life, to the oppressed; and he extorted a
+comfortable fortune in return for privileges which were never in
+his gift.
+
+Without the walls of Newgate the house of his frequentation was
+the `Dog Tavern.'  Thither he would wander every afternoon to
+meet his clients and to extort blood-money.  In this haunt of
+criminals and pettifoggers no man was better received than the
+Newgate Clerk, and while he assumed a manner of generous
+cordiality, it was a strange sight to see him wince when some
+sturdy ruffian slapped him too strenuously upon the back.  He had
+a joke and a chuckle for all, and his merry quips, dry as they
+were, were joyously quoted to all new-comers.  His legal
+ingenuity appeared miraculous, and it was confidently asserted in
+the Coffee House that he could turn black to white with so
+persuasive an argument that there was no Judge on the Bench to
+confute him.  But he was not omnipotent, and his zeal encountered
+many a serious check.  At times he failed to save the necks even
+of his intimates, since, when once a ruffian was notorious, Moll
+and the Clerk fought vainly for his release.  Thus it was that
+Cheney, the famous wrestler, whom Ralph had often backed against
+all comers, died at Tyburn.  He had been taken by the troopers
+red-handed upon the highway.  Seized after a desperate
+resistance, he was wounded wellnigh to death, and Briscoe quoted
+a dozen precedents to prove that he was unfit to be tried or
+hanged.  Argument failing, the munificent Clerk offered fifty
+pounds for the life of his friend.  But to no purpose: the
+valiant wrestler was carried to the cart in a chair, and so
+lifted to the gallows, which cured him of his gaping wounds.
+
+When the Commonwealth administered justice with pedantic
+severity, Briscoe's influence still further declined.  There was
+no longer scope in the State for men of spirit; even the gaols
+were handed over to the stern mercy of crop-eared Puritans; Moll
+herself had fallen upon evil times; and Ralph Briscoe determined
+to make a last effort for wealth and retirement.  At the very
+moment when his expulsion seemed certain, an heiress was thrown
+into Newgate upon a charge of murdering a too importunate
+suitor.  The chain of evidence was complete: the dagger plunged
+in his heart was recognised for her own; she was seen to decoy
+him to the secret corner of a wood, where his raucous love-making
+was silenced for ever.  Taken off her guard, she had even hinted
+confession of her crime, and nothing but intrigue could have
+saved her gentle neck from the gallows.  Briscoe, hungry for her
+money-bags, promised assistance.  He bribed, he threatened, he
+cajoled, he twisted the law as only he could twist it, he
+suppressed honest testimony, he procured false; in fine, he
+weakened the case against her with so resistless an effrontery,
+that not the Hanging Judge himself could convict the poor
+innocent.
+
+At the outset he had agreed to accept a handsome bribe, but as
+the trial approached, his avarice increased, and he would be
+content with nothing less than the lady's hand and fortune.  Not
+that he loved her; his heart was long since given to Moll
+Cutpurse; but he knew that his career of depredation was at an
+end, and it became him to provide for his declining years.  The
+victim repulsed his suit, regretting a thousand times that she
+had stabbed her ancient lover.  At last, bidden summarily to
+choose between Death and the Clerk, she chose the Clerk, and thus
+Ralph Briscoe left Newgate the richest squire in a western
+county.  Henceforth he farmed his land like a gentleman, drank
+with those of his neighbours who would crack a bottle with him,
+and unlocked the strange stores of his memory to bumpkins who
+knew not the name of Newgate.  Still devoted to sport, he
+hunted the fox, and made such a bull-ring as his youthful
+imagination could never have pictured.  So he lived a life of
+country ease, and died a churchwarden.  And he deserved his
+prosperity, for he carried the soul of Falstaff in the shrunken
+body of Justice Shallow.
+
+
+GILDEROY AND THE SIXTEEN-
+STRING JACK
+
+I
+GILDEROY
+
+
+GILDEROY
+
+HE stood six feet ten in his stockinged feet, and was the tallest
+ruffian that ever cut a purse or held up a coach on the highway. 
+A mass of black hair curled over a low forehead, and a glittering
+eye intensified his villainous aspect; nor did a deep scar,
+furrowing his cheek from end to end, soften the horror of his
+sudden apparition.  Valiant men shuddered at his approach; women
+shrank from the distant echo of his name; for fifteen years he
+terrorised Scotland from Caithness to the border; and the most
+partial chronicler never insulted his memory with the record of a
+good deed.
+
+He was born to a gentle family in the Calendar of Monteith, and
+was celebrated even in boyhood for his feats of strength and
+daring.  While still at school he could hold a hundredweight at
+arm's-length, and crumple up a horseshoe like a wisp of hay.  The
+fleetest runner, the most desperate fighter in the country, he
+was already famous before his name was besmirched with crime, and
+he might have been immortalised as the Hercules of the
+seventeenth century, had not his ambition been otherwise
+flattered.  At the outset, though the inclination was never
+lacking, he knew small temptation to break the sterner laws of
+conduct.  His pleasures were abundantly supplied by his father's
+generosity, and he had no need to refrain from such vices as
+became a gentleman.  If he was no drunkard, it was because his
+head was equal to the severest strain, and, despite his
+forbidding expression, he was always a successful breaker of
+hearts.  His very masterfulness overcame the most stubborn
+resistance; and more than once the pressure of his dishonourable
+suit converted hatred into love.  At the very time that he was
+denounced for Scotland's disgrace, his praises were chanted in
+many a dejected ballad.  `Gilderoy was a bonny boy,' sang one
+heart-broken maiden:
+
+          Had roses till his shoon,
+     His stockings were of silken soy,
+          Wi' garters hanging doon.
+
+But in truth he was admired less for his amiability than for that
+quality of governance which, when once he had torn the decalogue
+to pieces, made him a veritable emperor of crime.
+
+His father's death was the true beginning of his career.  A
+modest patrimony was squandered in six months, and Gilderoy had
+no penny left wherewith to satisfy the vices which insisted upon
+indulgence.  He demanded money at all hazards, and money without
+toil.  For a while his more loudly clamant needs were fulfilled
+by the amiable simplicity of his mother, whom he blackmailed
+with insolence and contempt.  And when she, wearied by his
+shameless importunity, at last withdrew her support, he
+determined upon a monstrous act of vengeance.  With a noble
+affectation of penitence he visited his home; promised reform at
+supper; and said good-night in the broken accent of
+reconciliation.  No sooner was the house sunk in slumber than he
+crawled stealthily upstairs in order to forestall by theft a
+promised generosity.  He opened the door of the bed-chamber in a
+hushed silence; but the wrenching of the cofferlid awoke the
+sleeper, and Gilderoy, having cut his mother's throat with an
+infamous levity, seized whatever money and jewels were in the
+house, cruelly maltreated his sister, and laughingly burnt the
+house to the ground, that the possibility of evidence might be
+destroyed.
+
+Henceforth his method of plunder was assured.  It was part of his
+philosophy to prevent detection by murder, and the flames from
+the burning walls added a pleasure to his lustful eye.  His march
+across Scotland was marked by slaughtered families and ruined
+houses.  Plunder was the first cause of his exploits, but there
+is no doubt that death and arson were a solace to his fierce
+spirit; and for a while this giant of cruelty knew neither check
+nor hindrance.  Presently it became a superstition with him that
+death was the inevitable accompaniment of robbery, and, as he was
+incapable of remorse, he grew callous, and neglected the simplest
+precautions.  At Dunkeld he razed a rifled house to the
+ground, and with the utmost effrontery repeated the performance
+at Aberdeen.  But at last he had been tracked by a company of
+soldiers, who, that justice might not be cheated of her prey,
+carried him to gaol, where after the briefest trial he was
+condemned to death.
+
+Gilderoy, however, was still master of himself.  His immense
+strength not only burst his bonds, but broke prison, and this
+invincible Samson was once more free in Aberdeen, inspiring that
+respectable city with a legendary dread.  The reward of one
+hundred pounds was offered in vain.  Had he shown himself on the
+road in broad daylight, none would have dared to arrest him, and
+it was not until his plans were deliberately laid, that he
+crossed the sea.  The more violent period of his career was at an
+end.  Never again did he yield to his passion for burning and
+sudden death; and, if the world found him unconquerable, his
+self-control is proved by the fact that in the heyday of his
+strength he turned from his unredeemed brutality to a gentler
+method.  He now deserted Scotland for France, with which, like
+all his countrymen, he claimed a cousinship; and so profoundly
+did he impose upon Paris with his immense stature, his elegant
+attire, his courtly manners (for he was courtesy itself, when it
+pleased him), that he was taken for an eminent scholar, or at
+least a soldier of fortune.
+
+Prosperity might doubtless have followed a discreet profession,
+but Gilderoy must still be thieving, and he reaped a rich harvest
+among the unsuspicious courtiers of France.  His most highly
+renowned exploit was performed at St. Denis, and the record of
+France's humiliation is still treasured.  The great church was
+packed with ladies of fashion and their devout admirers. 
+Richelieu attended in state; the king himself shone upon the
+assembly.  The strange Scotsman, whom no man knew and all men
+wondered at, attracted a hundred eyes to himself and his
+magnificent equipment.  But it was not his to be idle, and at the
+very moment whereat Mass was being sung, he contrived to lighten
+Richelieu's pocket of a purse.  The king was a delighted witness
+of the theft; Gilderoy, assuming an air of facile intimacy,
+motioned him to silence; and he, deeming it a trick put upon
+Richelieu by a friend, hastened, at the service-end, to ask his
+minister if perchance he had a purse of gold upon him.  Richelieu
+instantly discovered the loss, to the king's uncontrolled
+hilarity, which was mitigated when it was found that the thief,
+having emptied the king's pocket at the unguarded moment of his
+merriment, had left them both the poorer.
+
+Such were Gilderoy's interludes of gaiety; and when you remember
+the cynical ferocity of his earlier performance, you cannot deny
+him the credit of versatility.  He stayed in France until his
+ominous reputation was too widely spread; whereupon he crossed
+the Pyrenees, travelling like a gentleman, in a brilliant
+carriage of his own.  From Spain he carried off a priceless
+collection of silver plate; and he returned to his own country,
+fatigued, yet unsoftened, by the grand tour.  Meanwhile, a
+forgetful generation had not kept his memory green.  The monster,
+who punished Scotland a year ago with fire and sword, had passed
+into oblivion, and Gilderoy was able to establish for himself a
+new reputation.  He departed as far as possible from his ancient
+custom, joined the many cavaliers, who were riding up and down
+the country, pistol in hand, and presently proved a dauntless
+highwayman.  He had not long ridden in the neighbourhood of Perth
+before he met the Earl of Linlithgow, from whom he took a gold
+watch, a diamond ring, and eighty guineas.  Being an outlaw, he
+naturally espoused the King's cause, and would have given a year
+of his life to meet a Regicide.  Once upon a time, says rumour,
+he found himself face to face with Oliver Cromwell, whom he
+dragged from his coach, set ignominiously upon an ass, and so
+turned adrift with his feet tied under the beast's belly.  The
+story is incredible, not only because the loyal historians of the
+time caused Oliver to be robbed daily on every road in Great
+Britain, but because our Gilderoy, had he ever confronted the
+Protector, most assuredly would not have allowed him to escape
+with his life.
+
+Tired of scouring the highway, Gilderoy resolved upon another
+enterprise.  He collected a band of fearless ruffians, and placed
+himself at their head.  With this army to aid, he harried
+Sutherland and the North, lifting cattle, plundering homesteads,
+and stopping wayfarers with a humour and adroitness worthy
+of Robin Hood.  No longer a lawless adventurer, he made his own
+conditions of life, and forced the people to obey them.  He who
+would pay Gilderoy a fair contribution ran no risk of losing his
+sheep or oxen.  But evasion was impossible, and the smallest
+suspicion of falsehood was punished by death.  The peaceably
+inclined paid their toll with regret; the more daring opposed the
+raider to their miserable undoing; the timid satisfied the utmost
+exactions of Gilderoy, and deemed themselves fortunate if they
+left the country with their lives.
+
+Thus Scotland became a land of dread; the most restless man
+within her borders hardly dare travel beyond his byre.  The law
+was powerless against this indomitable scourge, and the reward of
+a thousand marks would have been offered in vain, had not
+Gilderoy's cruelty estranged his mistress.  This traitress--Peg
+Cunningham was her name--less for avarice than in revenge for
+many insults and infidelities, at last betrayed her master. 
+Having decoyed him to her house, she admitted fifty armed men,
+and thus imagined a full atonement for her unnumbered wrongs. 
+But Gilderoy was triumphant to the last.  Instantly suspecting
+the treachery of his mistress, he burst into her bed-chamber,
+and, that she might not enjoy the price of blood, ripped her up
+with a hanger.  Then he turned defiant upon the army arrayed
+against him, and killed eight men before the others captured him.
+
+Disarmed after a desperate struggle, he was loaded with chains
+and carried to Edinburgh, where he was starved for three
+days, and then hanged without the formality of a trial on a
+gibbet, thirty feet high, set up in the Grassmarket.  Even then
+Scotland's vengeance was unsatisfied.  The body, cut down from
+its first gibbet, was hung in chains forty feet above Leith Walk,
+where it creaked and gibbered as a warning to evildoers for half
+a century, until at last the inhabitants of that respectable
+quarter petitioned that Gilderoy's bones should cease to rattle,
+and that they should enjoy the peace impossible for his jingling
+skeleton.
+
+Gilderoy was no drawing-room scoundrel, no villain of schoolgirl
+romance.  He felt remorse as little as he felt fear, and there
+was no crime from whose commission he shrank.  Before his death
+he confessed to thirty-seven murders, and bragged that he had
+long since lost count of his robberies and rapes.  Something must
+be abated for boastfulness.  But after all deduction there
+remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed.  His most admirably
+artistic quality is his complete consistence.  He was a ruffian
+finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no
+weakness.  Though he never preached a sermon against the human
+race, he practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a
+gospel of hate.  He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he
+murdered his own mother with as light a heart as he sent a
+strange widow of Aberdeen to her death.  His skill is undoubted,
+and he proved by the discipline of his band that he was not
+without some talent of generalship.  But he owed much of his
+success to his physical strength, and to the temperament, which
+never knew the scandal of hesitancy or dread.
+
+A born marauder, he devoted his life to his trade; and, despite
+his travels in France and Spain, he enjoyed few intervals of
+merriment.  Even the humour, which proved his redemption, was as
+dour and grim as Scotland can furnish at her grimmes: and
+dourest.  Here is a specimen will serve as well as another: three
+of Gilderoy's gang had been hanged according to the sentence of a
+certain Lord of Session, and the Chieftain, for his own vengeance
+and the intimidation of justice, resolved upon an exemplary
+punishment.  He waylaid the Lord of Session, emptied his pockets,
+killed his horses, broke his coach in pieces, and having bound
+his lackeys, drowned them in a pond.  This was but the prelude of
+revenge, for presently (and here is the touch of humour) he made
+the Lord of Session ride at dead of night to the gallows, whereon
+the three malefactors were hanging.  One arm of the crossbeams
+was still untenanted.  `By my soul, mon,' cried Gilderoy to the
+Lord of Session, `as this gibbet is built to break people's
+craigs, and is not uniform without another, I must e'en hang you
+upon the vacant beam.'  And straightway the Lord of Session swung
+in the moonlight, and Gilderoy had cracked his black and solemn
+joke.
+
+
+This sense of fun is the single trait which relieves the colossal
+turpitude of Gilderoy.  And, though even his turpitude was
+melodramatic in its lack of balance, it is a unity of character
+which is the foundation of his greatness.  He was no fumbler, led
+away from his purpose by the first diversion; his ambition was
+clear before him, and he never fell below it.  He defied Scotland
+for fifteen years, was hanged so high that he passed into a
+proverb, and though his handsome, sinister face might have made
+women his slaves, he was never betrayed by passion (or by virtue)
+to an amiability.
+
+
+
+II
+SIXTEEN-STRING JACK
+
+
+SIXTEEN-STRING JACK
+
+THE `Green Pig' stood in the solitude of the North Road.  Its
+simple front, its neatly balanced windows, curtained with white,
+gave it an air of comfort and tranquillity.  The smoke which
+curled from its hospitable chimney spoke of warmth and good fare.
+
+To pass it was to spurn the last chance of a bottle for many a
+weary mile, and the prudent traveller would always rest an hour
+by its ample fireside, or gossip with its fantastic hostess. 
+Now, the hostess of the little inn was Ellen Roach, friend and
+accomplice of Sixteen-String Jack, once the most famous woman in
+England, and still after a weary stretch at Botany Bay the
+strangest of companions, the most buxom of spinsters.  Her beauty
+was elusive even in her triumphant youth, and middle-age had
+neither softened her traits nor refined her expression.  Her
+auburn hair, once the glory of Covent Garden, was fading to a
+withered grey; she was never tall enough to endure an encroaching
+stoutness with equanimity; her dumpy figure made you marvel at
+her past success; and hardship had furrowed her candid brow into
+wrinkles.  But when she opened her lips she became instantly
+animated.  With a glass before her on the table, she would
+prattle frankly and engagingly of the past.  Strange cities had
+she seen; she had faced the dangers of an adventurous life with
+calmness and good temper.  And yet Botany Bay, with its attendant
+horrors, was already fading from her memory.  In imagination she
+was still with her incomparable hero, and it was her solace,
+after fifteen years, to sing the praise and echo the perfections
+of Sixteen-String Jack.
+
+`How well I remember,' she would murmur, as though unconscious of
+her audience, `the unhappy day when Jack Rann was first arrested.
+
+It was May, and he came back travel-stained and weary in the
+brilliant dawn.  He had stopped a one-horse shay near the nine-
+mile stone on the Hounslow Road--every word of his confession is
+burnt into my brain--and had taken a watch and a handful of
+guineas.  I was glad enough of the money, for there was no penny
+in the house, and presently I sent the maid-servant to make the
+best bargain she could with the watch.  But the silly jade, by
+the saddest of mishaps, took the trinket straight to the very man
+who made it, and he, suspecting a theft, had us both arrested. 
+Even then Jack might have been safe, had not the devil prompted
+me to speak the truth.  Dismayed by the magistrate, I owned,
+wretched woman that I was, that I had received the watch from
+Rann, and in two hours Jack also was under lock and key. 
+Yet, when we were sent for trial I made what amends I could.  I
+declared on oath that I had never seen Sixteen-String Jack in my
+life; his name came to my lips by accident; and, hector as they
+would, the lawyers could not frighten me to an acknowledgment. 
+Meanwhile Jack's own behaviour was grand.  I was the proudest
+woman in England as I stood by his side in the dock.  When you
+compared him with Sir John Fielding, you did not doubt for an
+instant which was the finer gentleman.  And what a dandy was my
+Jack!  Though he came there to answer for his life, he was all
+ribbons and furbelows.  His irons were tied up with the daintiest
+blue bows, and in the breast of his coat he carried a bundle of
+flowers as large as a birch-broom.  His neck quivered in the
+noose, yet he was never cowed to civility.  `I know no more of
+the matter than you do,' he cried indignantly, `nor half so much
+neither,' and if the magistrate had not been an ill-mannered oaf,
+he would not have dared to disbelieve my true-hearted Jack.  That
+time we escaped with whole skins; and off we went, after dinner,
+to Vauxhall, where Jack was more noticed than the fiercest of the
+bloods, and where he filled the heart of George Barrington with
+envy.  Nor was he idle, despite his recent escape: he brought
+away two watches and three purses from the Garden, so that our
+necessities were amply supplied.  Ah, I should have been happy in
+those days if only Jack had been faithful.  But he had a
+roving eye and a joyous temperament; and though he loved me
+better than any of the baggages to whom he paid court, he would
+not visit me so often as he should.  Why, once he was hustled off
+to Bow Street because the watch caught him climbing in at Doll
+Frampton's window.  And she, the shameless minx, got him off by
+declaring in open court that she would be proud to receive him
+whenever he would deign to ring at her bell.  That is the penalty
+of loving a great man: you must needs share his affection with a
+set of unworthy wenches.  Yet Jack was always kind to me, and I
+was the chosen companion of his pranks.
+
+`Never can I forget the splendid figure he cut that day at
+Bagnigge Wells.  We had driven down in our coach, and all the
+world marvelled at our magnificence.  Jack was brave in a scarlet
+coat, a tambour waistcoat, and white silk stockings.  From the
+knees of his breeches streamed the strings (eight at each),
+whence he got his name, and as he plucked off his lace-hat the
+dinner-table rose at him.  That was a moment worth living for,
+and when, after his first bottle, Jack rattled the glasses, and
+declared himself a highwayman, the whole company shuddered. 
+``But, my friends,'' quoth he, ``to-day I am making holiday, so
+that you have naught to fear.''  When the wine 's in, the wit 's
+out, and Jack could never stay his hand from the bottle.  The
+more he drank, the more he bragged, until, thoroughly fuddled, he
+lost a ring from his finger, and charged the miscreants in
+the room with stealing it.  ``However,'' hiccupped he, ``'tis a
+mere nothing, worth a paltry hundred pounds--less than a lazy
+evening's work.  So I'll let the trifling theft pass.''  But the
+cowards were not content with Jack's generosity, and seizing upon
+him, they thrust him neck and crop through the window.  They were
+seventeen to one, the craven-hearted loons; and I could but leave
+the marks of my nails on the cheek of the foremost, and follow my
+hero into the yard, where we took coach, and drove sulkily back
+to Covent Garden.
+
+`And yet he was not always in a mad humour; in fact, Sixteen-
+String Jack, for all his gaiety, was a proud, melancholy man. 
+The shadow of the tree was always upon him, and he would make me
+miserable by talking of his certain doom.  ``I have a hundred
+pounds in my pocket,'' he would say; ``I shall spend that, and
+then I shan't last long.''  And though I never thought him
+serious, his prophecy came true enough.  Only a few months before
+the end we had visited Tyburn together.  With his usual
+carelessness, he passed the line of constables who were on guard.
+
+``It is very proper,'' said he, in his jauntiest tone, ``that I
+should be a spectator on this melancholy occasion.''  And though
+none of the dullards took his jest, they instantly made way for
+him.  For my Jack was always a gentleman, though he was bred to
+the stable, and his bitterest enemy could not have denied that he
+was handsome.  His open countenance was as honest as the
+day, and the brown curls over his forehead were more elegant than
+the smartest wig.  Wherever he went the world did him honour, and
+many a time my vanity was sorely wounded.  I was a pretty girl,
+mind you, though my travels have not improved my beauty; and I
+had many admirers before ever I picked up Jack Rann at a
+masquerade.  Why, there was a Templar, with two thousand a year,
+who gave me a carriage and servants while I still lived at the
+dressmaker's in Oxford Street, and I was not out of my teens when
+the old Jew in St. Mary Axe took me into keeping.  But when Jack
+was by, I had no chance of admiration.  All the eyes were glued
+upon him, and his poor doxy had to be content with a furtive look
+thrown over a stranger's shoulder.  At Barnet races, the year
+before they sent me across the sea, we were followed by a crowd
+the livelong day; and truly Jack, in his blue satin waistcoat
+laced with silver, might have been a peer.  At any rate, he had
+not his equal on the course, and it is small wonder that never
+for a moment were we left to ourselves.
+
+`But happiness does not last for ever; only too often we were
+gravelled for lack of money, and Jack, finding his purse empty,
+could do naught else than hire a hackney and take to the road
+again, while I used to lie awake listening to the watchman's
+raucous voice, and praying God to send back my warrior rich and
+scatheless.  So times grew more and more difficult.  Jack would
+stay a whole night upon the heath, and come home with an empty
+pocket or a beggarly half crown.  And there was nothing,
+after a shabby coat that he hated half so much as a sheriff's
+officer.  ``Learn a lesson in politeness,'' he said to one of the
+wretches who dragged him off to the Marshalsea.  ``When Sir John
+Fielding's people come after me they use me genteelly; they only
+hold up a finger, beckon me, and I follow as quietly as a lamb. 
+But you bluster and insult, as though you had never dealings with
+gentlemen.''  Poor Jack, he was of a proud stomach, and could not
+abide interference; yet they would never let him go free.  And he
+would have been so happy had he been allowed his own way.  To
+pull out a rusty pistol now and again, and to take a purse from a
+traveller--surely these were innocent pleasures, and he never
+meant to hurt a fellow-creature.  But for all his kindness of
+heart, for all his love of splendour and fine clothes, they took
+him at last.
+
+`And this time, too, it was a watch which was our ruin.  How
+often did I warn him:  ``Jack,'' I would say, ``take all the
+money you can.  Guineas tell no tale.  But leave the watches in
+their owners' fobs.''  Alas! he did not heed my words, and the
+last man he ever stopped on the road was that pompous rascal, Dr.
+Bell, then chaplain to the Princess Amelia.  ``Give me your
+money,'' screamed Jack, ``and take no notice or I'll blow your
+brains out.''  And the doctor gave him all that he had, the mean-
+spirited devil-dodger, and it was no more than eighteenpence. 
+Now what should a man of courage do with eighteenpence?  So poor
+Jack was forced to seize the parson's watch and trinkets as
+well, and thus it was that a second time we faced the Blind Beak.
+
+When Jack brought home the watch, I was seized with a shuddering
+presentiment, and I would have given the world to throw it out of
+the window.  But I could not bear to see him pinched with hunger,
+and he had already tossed the doctor's eighteenpence to a beggar
+woman.  So I trudged off to the pawnbroker's, to get what price I
+could, and I bethought me that none would know me for what I was
+so far away as Oxford Street.  But the monster behind the counter
+had a quick suspicion, though I swear I looked as innocent as a
+babe; he discovered the owner of the watch, and infamously
+followed me to my house.
+
+`The next day we were both arrested, and once more we stood in
+the hot, stifling Court of the Old Bailey.  Jack was radiant as
+ever, the one spot of colour and gaiety in that close, sodden
+atmosphere.  When we were taken from Bow Street a thousand people
+formed our guard of honour, and for a month we were the twin
+wonders of London.  The lightest word, the fleetest smile of the
+renowned highwayman, threw the world into a fit of excitement,
+and a glimpse of Rann was worth a king's ransom.  I could look
+upon him all day for nothing!  And I knew what a fever of fear
+throbbed behind his mask of happy contempt.  Yet bravely he
+played the part unto the very end.  If the toasts of London were
+determined to gaze at him, he assured them they should have a
+proper salve for their eyes.  So he dressed himself as a
+light-hearted sportsman.  His coat and waistcoat were of pea-
+green cloth; his buckskin breeches were spotlessly new, and all
+tricked out with the famous strings; his hat was bound round with
+silver cords; and even the ushers of the Court were touched to
+courtesy.  He would whisper to me, as we stood in the dock,
+``Cheer up, my girl.  I have ordered the best supper that Covent
+Garden can provide, and we will make merry to-night when this
+foolish old judge has done his duty.''  The supper was never
+eaten.  Through the weary afternoon we waited for acquittal.  The
+autumn sun sank in hopeless gloom.  The wretched lamps twinkled
+through the jaded air of the court-house.  In an hour I lived a
+thousand years of misery, and when the sentence was read, the
+words carried no sense to my withered brain.  It was only in my
+cell I realised that I had seen Jack Rann for the last time; that
+his pea-green coat would prove a final and ineffaceable memory.
+
+`Alas! I, who had never been married, was already a hempen widow;
+but I was too hopelessly heartbroken for my lover's fate to think
+of my own paltry hardship.  I never saw him again.  They told me
+that he suffered at Tyburn like a man, and that he counted upon a
+rescue to the very end.  They told me (still bitterer news to
+hear) that two days before his death he entertained seven women
+at supper, and was in the wildest humour.  This almost broke my
+heart; it was an infidelity committed on the other side of the
+grave.  But, poor Jack, he was a good lad, and loved me more
+than them all, though he never could be faithful to me.'  And
+thus, bidding the drawer bring fresh glasses, Ellen Roach would
+end her story.  Though she had told it a hundred times, at the
+last words a tear always sparkled in her eye.  She lived without
+friend and without lover, faithful to the memory of Sixteen-
+String Jack, who for her was the only reality in the world of
+shades.  Her middle-age was as distant as her youth.  The
+dressmaker's in Oxford Street was as vague a dream as the
+inhospitable shore of Botany Bay.  So she waited on to a weary
+eld, proud of the `Green Pig's' well-ordered comfort, prouder
+still that for two years she shared the glory of Jack Rann, and
+that she did not desert her hero, even in his punishment.
+
+
+
+III
+A PARALLEL
+
+(GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-
+STRING JACK)
+
+
+A PARALLEL
+(GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN-STRING JACK)
+
+THEIR closest parallel is the notoriety which dogged them from
+the very day of their death.  Each, for his own exploits, was the
+most famous man of his time, the favourite of broadsides, the
+prime hero of the ballad-mongers.  And each owed his fame as much
+to good fortune as to merit, since both were excelled in their
+generation by more skilful scoundrels.  If Gilderoy was
+unsurpassed in brutality, he fell immeasurably below Hind in
+artistry and wit, nor may he be compared to such accomplished
+highwaymen as Mull Sack or the Golden Farmer.  His method was not
+elevated by a touch of the grand style.  He stamped all the rules
+of the road beneath his contemptuous foot, and cared not what
+enormity he committed in his quest for gold.  Yet, though he
+lived in the true Augustan age, he yielded to no one of his
+rivals in glorious recognition.  So, too, Jack Rann, of the
+Sixteen Strings, was a near contemporary of George Barrington. 
+While that nimble-fingered prig was making a brilliant
+appearance at Vauxhall, and emptying the pockets of his
+intimates, Rann was riding over Hounslow Heath, and flashing his
+pistol in the eye of the wayfarer.  The very year in which Jack
+danced his last jig at Tyburn, Barrington had astonished London
+by a fruitless attempt to steal Prince Orloff's miraculous snuff-
+box.  And not even Ellen Roach herself would have dared to assert
+that Rann was Barrington's equal in sleight of hand.  But Rann
+holds his own against the best of his craft, with an imperishable
+name, while a host of more distinguished cracksmen are excluded
+even from the Newgate Calendar.
+
+In truth, there is one quality which has naught to do with
+artistic supremacy; and in this quality both Rann and Gilderoy
+were rich beyond their fellows.  They knew (none better) how to
+impose upon the world.  Had their deserts been even less than
+they were, they would still have been bravely notorious.  It is a
+common superstition that the talent for advertisement has but a
+transitory effect, that time sets all men in their proper places.
+
+Nothing can be more false; for he who has once declared himself
+among the great ones of the earth, not only holds his position
+while he lives, but forces an unreasoning admiration upon the
+future.  Though he declines from the lofty throne, whereon his
+own vanity and love of praise have set him, he still stands above
+the modest level which contents the genuinely great.  Why does
+Euripides still throw a shadow upon the worthier poets of his
+time?  Because he had the faculty of displacement, because
+he could compel the world to profess an interest not only in his
+work but in himself.  Why is Michael Angelo a loftier figure in
+the history of art than Donatello, the supreme sculptor of his
+time?  Because Donatello had not the temper which would bully a
+hundred popes, and extract a magnificent advertisement from each
+encounter.  Why does Shelley still claim a larger share of the
+world's admiration than Keats, his indubitable superior?  Because
+Shelley was blessed or cursed with the trick of interesting the
+world by the accidents of his life.
+
+So by a similar faculty Gilderoy and Jack Rann have kept
+themselves and their achievements in the light of day.  Had they
+lived in the nineteenth century they might have been the vendors
+of patent pills, or the chairmen of bubble companies.  Whatever
+trade they had followed, their names would have been on every
+hoarding, their wares would have been puffed in every journal. 
+They understood the art of publicity better than any of their
+contemporaries, and they are remembered not because they were the
+best thieves of their time, but because they were determined to
+interest the people in their misdeeds.  Gilderoy's brutality,
+which was always theatrical, ensured a constant remembrance, and
+the lofty gallows added to his repute; while the brilliant
+inspiration of the strings, which decorated Rann's breeches, was
+sufficient to conquer death.  How should a hero sink to oblivion
+who had chosen for himself so splendid a name as Sixteen-
+String Jack?
+
+So far, then, their achievement is parallel.  And parallel also
+is their taste for melodrama.  Each employed means too great or
+too violent for the end in view.  Gilderoy burnt houses and
+ravished women, when his sole object was the acquisition of
+money.  Sixteen-String Jack terrified Bagnigge Wells with the
+dreadful announcement that he was a highwayman, when his kindly,
+stupid heart would have shrunk from the shedding of a drop of
+blood.  So they both blustered through the world, the one in
+deed, the other in word; and both played their parts with so
+little refinement that they frightened the groundlings to a timid
+admiration.  Here the resemblance is at an end.  In the
+essentials of their trade Gilderoy was a professional, Rann a
+mere amateur.  They both bullied; but, while Sixteen-String Jack
+was content to shout threats, and pick up half-a-crown, Gilderoy
+breathed murder, and demanded a vast ransom.  Only once in his
+career did the `disgraceful Scotsman' become gay and debonair. 
+Only once did he relax the tension of his frown, and pick pockets
+with the lightness and freedom of a gentleman.  It was on his
+voyage to France that he forgot his old policy of arson and
+pillage, and truly the Court of the Great King was not the place
+for his rapacious cruelty.  Jack Rann, on the other hand, would
+have taken life as a prolonged jest, if Sir John Fielding and the
+sheriffs had not checked his mirth.  He was but a bungler on
+the road, with no more resource than he might have learned from
+the common chap-book, or from the dying speeches, hawked in
+Newgate Street.  But he had a fine talent for merriment; he loved
+nothing so well as a smart coat and a pretty woman.  Thieving was
+no passion with him, but a necessity.  How could he dance at a
+masquerade or court his Ellen with an empty pocket?  So he took
+to the road as the sole profession of an idle man, and he bullied
+his way from Hounslow to Epping in sheer lightness of heart. 
+After all, to rob Dr. Bell of eighteenpence was the work of a
+simpleton.  It was a very pretty taste which expressed itself in
+a pea-green coat and deathless strings; and Rann will keep
+posterity's respect rather for the accessories of his art than
+for the art itself.  On the other hand, you cannot imagine
+Gilderoy habited otherwise than in black; you cannot imagine this
+monstrous matricide taking pleasure in the smaller elegancies of
+life.  From first to last he was the stern and beetle-browed
+marauder, who would have despised the frippery of Sixteen-String
+Jack as vehemently as his sudden appearance would have frightened
+the foppish lover of Ellen Roach.
+
+Their conduct with women is sufficient index of their character. 
+Jack Rann was too general a lover for fidelity.  But he was
+amiable, even in his unfaithfulness; he won the undying affection
+of his Ellen; he never stood in the dock without a nosegay tied
+up by fair and nimble fingers; he was attended to Tyburn by
+a bevy of distinguished admirers.  Gilderoy, on the other hand,
+approached women in a spirit of violence.  His Sadic temper drove
+him to kill those whom he affected to love.  And his cruelty was
+amply repaid.  While Ellen Roach perjured herself to save the
+lover, to whose memory she professed a lifelong loyalty, it was
+Peg Cunningham who wreaked her vengeance in the betrayal of
+Gilderoy.  He remained true to his character, when he ripped up
+the belly of his betrayer.  This was the closing act of his life.
+
+Rann, also, was consistent, even to the gallows.  The night
+before his death he entertained seven women at supper, and
+outlaughed them all.  The contrast is not so violent as it
+appears.  The one act is melodrama, the other farce.  And what is
+farce, but melodrama in a happier shape?
+
+
+
+THOMAS PURENEY
+
+
+THOMAS PURENEY
+
+THOMAS PURENEY, Archbishop among Ordinaries, lived and preached
+in the heyday of Newgate.  His was the good fortune to witness
+Sheppard's encounter with the topsman, and to shrive the battered
+soul of Jonathan Wild.  Nor did he fall one inch below his
+opportunity.  Designed by Providence to administer a final
+consolation to the evil-doer, he permitted no false ambition to
+distract his talent.  As some men are born for the gallows, so he
+was born to thump the cushion of a prison pulpit; and his
+peculiar aptitude was revealed to him before he had time to spend
+his strength in mistaken endeavour.
+
+For thirty years his squat, stout figure was amiably familiar to
+all such as enjoyed the Liberties of the Jug.  For thirty years
+his mottled nose and the rubicundity of his cheeks were the
+ineffaceable ensigns of his intemperance.  Yet there was a grimy
+humour in his forbidding aspect.  The fusty black coat, which sat
+ill upon his shambling frame, was all besmirched with spilled
+snuff, and the lees of a thousand quart pots.  The bands of his
+profession were ever awry upon a tattered shirt.  His
+ancient wig scattered dust and powder as he went, while a single
+buckle of some tawdry metal gave a look of oddity to his clumsy,
+slipshod feet.  A caricature of a man, he ambled and chuckled and
+seized the easy pleasures within his reach.  There was never a
+summer's day but he caught upon his brow the few faint gleams of
+sunlight that penetrated the gloomy yard.  Hour after hour he
+would sit, his short fingers hardly linked across his belly,
+drinking his cup of ale, and puffing at a half-extinguished
+tobacco-pipe.  Meanwhile he would reflect upon those triumphs of
+oratory which were his supreme delight.  If it fell on a Monday
+that he took the air, a smile of satisfaction lit up his fat,
+loose features, for still he pondered the effect of yesterday's
+masterpiece.  On Saturday the glad expectancy of to-morrow lent
+him a certain joyous dignity.  At other times his eye lacked
+lustre, his gesture buoyancy, unless indeed he were called upon
+to follow the cart to Tyburn, or to compose the Last Dying Speech
+of some notorious malefactor.
+
+Preaching was the master passion of his life.  It was the pulpit
+that reconciled him to exile within a great city, and persuaded
+him to the enjoyment of roguish company.  Those there were who
+deemed his career unfortunate; but a sense of fitness might have
+checked their pity, and it was only in his hours of maudlin
+confidence that the Reverend Thomas confessed to disappointment. 
+Born of respectable parents in the County of Cambridgeshire,
+he nurtured his youth upon the exploits of James Hind and the
+Golden Farmer.  His boyish pleasure was to lie in the ditch,
+which bounded his father's orchard, studying that now forgotten
+masterpiece, `There's no Jest like a True Jest.' Then it was that
+he felt `immortal longings in his blood.'  He would take to the
+road, so he swore, and hold up his enemies like a gentleman. 
+Once, indeed, he was surprised by the clergyman of the parish in
+act to escape from the rectory with two volumes of sermons and a
+silver flagon.  The divine was minded to speak seriously to him
+concerning the dreadful sin of robbery, and having strengthened
+him with texts and good counsel, to send him forth unpunished. 
+`Thieving and covetousness,' said the parson, `must inevitably
+bring you to the gallows.  If you would die in your bed, repent
+you of your evildoing, and rob no more.'  The exhortation was not
+lost upon Pureney, who, chastened in spirit, straightly prevailed
+upon his father to enter him a pensioner at Corpus Christi
+College in the University of Cambridge, that at the proper time
+he might take orders.
+
+At Cambridge he gathered no more knowledge than was necessary for
+his profession, and wasted such hours as should have been given
+to study in drinking, dicing, and even less reputable pleasures. 
+Yet repentance was always easy, and he accepted his first curacy,
+at Newmarket, with a brave heart and a good hopefulness. 
+Fortunate was the choice of this early cure.  Had he been
+gently guided at the outset, who knows but he might have lived
+out his life in respectable obscurity?  But Newmarket then, as
+now, was a town of jollity and dissipation, and Pureney yielded
+without persuasion to the pleasures denied his cloth.  There was
+ever a fire to extinguish at his throat, nor could he veil his
+wanton eye at the sight of a pretty wench.  Again and again the
+lust of preaching urged him to repent, yet he slid back upon his
+past gaiety, until Parson Pureney became a byword.  Dismissed
+from Newmarket in disgrace, he wandered the country up and down
+in search of a pulpit, but so infamous became the habit of his
+life that only in prison could he find an audience fit and
+responsive.
+
+And, in the nick, the chaplaincy of Newgate fell vacant.  Here
+was the occasion to temper dissipation with piety, to indulge the
+twofold ambition of his life.  What mattered it, if within the
+prison walls he dipped his nose more deeply into the punch-bowl
+than became a divine?  The rascals would but respect him the more
+for his prowess, and knit more closely the bond of sympathy. 
+Besides, after preaching and punch he best loved a penitent, and
+where in the world could he find so rich a crop of erring souls
+ripe for repentance as in gaol?  Henceforth he might threaten,
+bluster, and cajole.  If amiability proved fruitless he would put
+cruelty to the test, and terrify his victims by a spirited
+reference to Hell and to that Burning Lake they were so soon to
+traverse.  At last, thought he, I shall be sure of my
+effect, and the prospect flattered his vanity.  In truth, he won
+an immediate and assured success.  Like the common file or
+cracksman, he fell into the habit of the place, intriguing with
+all the cleverness of a practised diplomatist, and setting one
+party against the other that he might in due season decide the
+trumpery dispute.  The trusted friend of many a distinguished
+prig and murderer, he so intimately mastered the slang and
+etiquette of the Jug, that he was appointed arbiter of all those
+nice questions of honour which agitated the more reputable among
+the cross-coves.  But these were the diversions of a strenuous
+mind, and it was in the pulpit or in the closet that the Reverend
+Thomas Pureney revealed his true talent.
+
+As the ruffian had a sense of drama, so he was determined that
+his words should scald and bite the penitent.  When the condemned
+pew was full of a Sunday his happiness was complete.  Now his
+deep chest would hurl salvo on salvo of platitudes against the
+sounding-board; now his voice, lowered to a whisper, would coax
+the hopeless prisoners to prepare their souls.  In a paroxysm of
+feigned anger he would crush the cushion with his clenched fist,
+or leaning over the pulpit side as though to approach the nearer
+to his victims, would roll a cold and bitter eye upon them, as of
+a cat watching caged birds.  One famous gesture was irresistible,
+and he never employed it but some poor ruffian fell senseless to
+the floor.  His stumpy fingers would fix a noose of air
+round some imagined neck, and so devoutly was the pantomime
+studied that you almost heard the creak of the retreating cart as
+the phantom culprit was turned off.  But his conduct in the
+pulpit was due to no ferocity of temperament.  He merely
+exercised his legitimate craft.  So long as Newgate supplied him
+with an enforced audience, so long would he thunder and bluster
+at the wrongdoer according to law and the dictates of his
+conscience.
+
+Many, in truth, were his triumphs, but, as he would mutter in his
+garrulous old age, never was he so successful as in the last
+exhortation delivered to Matthias Brinsden.  Now, Matthias
+Brinsden incontinently murdered his wife because she harboured
+too eager a love of the brandy-shop.  A model husband, he had
+spared no pains in her correction.  He had flogged her without
+mercy and without result.  His one design was to make his wife
+obey him, which, as the Scriptures say, all wives should do.  But
+the lust of brandy overcame wifely obedience, and Brinsden,
+hoping for the best, was constrained to cut a hole in her skull. 
+The next day she was as impudent as ever, until Matthias rose yet
+more fiercely in his wrath, and the shrew perished.  Then was
+Thomas Pureney's opportunity, and the Sunday following the
+miscreant's condemnation he delivered unto him and seventeen
+other malefactors the moving discourse which here follows:
+
+`We shall take our text,' gruffed the Ordinary `From out the
+Psalms:  ``Bloodthirsty and deceitful men shall not live out half
+their days.''  And firstly, we shall expound to you the heinous
+sin of murder, which is unlawful (1) according to the Natural
+Laws, (2) according to the Jewish Law, (3) according to the
+Christian Law, proportionably stronger.  By Nature 'tis unlawful
+as 'tis injuring Society: as 'tis robbing God of what is His
+Right and Property; as 'tis depriving the Slain of the
+satisfaction of Eating, Drinking, Talking, and the Light of the
+Sun, which it is his right to enjoy.  And especially 'tis
+unlawful, as it is sending a Soul naked and unprepared to appear
+before a wrathful and avenging Deity without time to make his
+Soul composedly or to listen to the thoughtful ministrations of
+one (like ourselves) soundly versed in Divinity.  By the Jewish
+Law 'tis forbidden, for is it not written (Gen. ix. 6): 
+``Whosoever sheddeth Man's Blood, by Man his Blood shall be
+shed''?  And if an Eye be given for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth,
+how shall the Murderer escape with his dishonoured Life?  'Tis
+further forbidden by the Christian Law (proportionably stronger).
+
+But on this head we would speak no word, for were not you all, O
+miserable Sinners, born not in the Darkness of Heathendom, but in
+the burning Light of Christian England?
+
+`Secondly, we will consider the peculiar wickedness of Parricide,
+and especially the Murder of a Wife.  What deed, in truth, is
+more heinous than that a man should slay the Parent of his own
+Children, the Wife he had once loved and chose out of all the
+world to be a Companion of his Days; the Wife who long had
+shared his good Fortune and his ill, who had brought him with
+Pain and Anguish several Tokens and Badges of Affection, the
+Olive Branches round about his Table?  To embrew the hands in
+such blood is double Murder, as it murders not only the Person
+slain, but kills the Happiness of the orphaned Children,
+depriving them of Bread, and forcing them upon wicked Ways of
+getting a Maintenance, which often terminate in Newgate and an
+ignominious death.
+
+`Bloodthirsty men, we have said, shall not live out half their
+Days.  And think not that Repentance avails the Murderer.  ``Hell
+and Damnation are never full'' (Prov. xxvii. 20), and the meanest
+Sinner shall find a place in the Lake which burns unto Eternity
+with Fire and Brimstone.  Alas! your Punishment shall not finish
+with the Noose.  Your ``end is to be burned'' (Heb. vi. 8), to be
+burned, for the Blood that is shed cries aloud for Vengeance.' 
+At these words, as Pureney would relate with a smile of
+recollected triumph, Matthias Brinsden screamed aloud, and a
+shiver ran through the idle audience which came to Newgate on a
+Black Sunday, as to a bull-baiting.  Truly, the throng of
+thoughtless spectators hindered the proper solace of the
+Ordinary's ministrations, and many a respectable murderer
+complained of the intruding mob.  But the Ordinary, otherwise
+minded, loved nothing so well as a packed house, and though he
+would invite the criminal to his private closet, and comfort his
+solitude with pious ejaculations, he would neither shield
+him from curiosity, nor tranquillise his path to the unquenchable
+fire.
+
+Not only did he exercise in the pulpit a poignant and visible
+influence.  He boasted the confidence of many heroes.  His green
+old age cherished no more famous memory than the friendship of
+Jonathan Wild.  He had known the Great Man at his zenith; he had
+wrestled with him in the hour of discomfiture; he had preached
+for his benefit that famous sermon on the text:  `Hide Thy Face
+from my sins, and blot out all my Iniquities'; he had witnessed
+the hero's awful progress from Newgate to Tyburn; he had seen him
+shiver at the nubbing-cheat; he had composed for him a last dying
+speech, which did not shame the king of thief-takers, and whose
+sale brought a comfortable profit to the widow.  Jonathan, on his
+side, had shown the Ordinary not a little condescension.  It had
+been his whim, on the eve of his marriage, to present Mr. Pureney
+with a pair of white gloves, which were treasured as a priceless
+relic for many a year.  And when he paid his last, forced visit
+to Newgate, he gave the Chaplain, for a pledge of his esteem,
+that famous silver staff, which he carried, as a badge of
+authority from the Government, the better to keep the people in
+awe, and favour the enterprises of his rogues.
+
+Only one cloud shadowed this old and equal friendship.  Jonathan
+had entertained the Ordinary with discourse so familiar, they had
+cracked so many a bottle together, that when the irrevocable
+sentence was passed, when he who had never shown mercy, expected
+none, the Great Man found the exhortations of the illiterate
+Chaplain insufficient for his high purpose.  `As soon as I came
+into the condemned Hole,' thus he wrote, `I began to think of
+making a preparation for my soul; and the better to bring my
+stubborn heart to repentance, I desired the advice of a man of
+learning, a man of sound judgment in divinity, and therefore
+application being made to the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, he very
+Christian-like gave me his assistance.'  Alas!  Poor Pureney!  He
+lacked subtlety, and he was instantly baffled, when the Great Man
+bade him expound the text:  `Cursed is every one that hangeth on
+a tree.'  The shiftiest excuse would have brought solace to a
+breaking heart and conviction to a casuist brain.  Yet for once
+the Ordinary was at a loss, and Wild, finding him insufficient
+for his purpose, turned a deaf ear to his ministrations.  Thus he
+was rudely awakened from the dream of many sleepless nights.  His
+large heart almost broke at the neglect.
+
+But if his more private counsels were scorned, he still had the
+joy of delivering a masterpiece from the pulpit, of using `all
+the means imaginable to make Wild think of another world,' and of
+seeing him as neatly turned off as the most exacting Ordinary
+could desire.  And what inmate of Newgate ever forgot the
+afternoon of that glorious day (May the 24th, 1725)?  Mr. Pureney
+returned to his flock, fortified with punch and good
+tidings.  He pictured the scene at Tyburn with a bibulous
+circumstance, which admirably became his style, rejoicing, as he
+has rejoiced ever since, that, though he lost a friend, the
+honest rogue was saved at last from the machinations of the
+thief-taker.
+
+So he basked and smoked and drank his ale, retelling the ancient
+stories, and hiccuping forth the ancient sermons.  So, in the
+fading twilight of life, he smiled the smile of contentment, as
+became one who had emptied more quarts, had delivered more
+harrowing discourses, and had lived familiarly with more
+scoundrels than any devil-dodger of his generation.
+
+
+
+SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE
+
+I
+JACK SHEPPARD
+
+
+
+JACK SHEPPARD
+IT was midnight when Jack Sheppard reached the leads, wearied by
+his magical achievement, and still fearful of discovery.  The
+`jolly pair of handcuffs,' provided by the thoughtful Governor,
+lay discarded in his distant cell; the chains which a few hours
+since had grappled him to the floor encumbered the now useless
+staple.  No trace of the ancient slavery disgraced him save the
+iron anklets which clung about his legs; though many a broken
+wall and shattered lock must serve for evidence of his prowess on
+the morrow.  The Stone-Jug was all be-chipped and shattered. 
+From the castle he had forced his way through a nine-foot wall
+into the Red Room, whose bolts, bars, and hinges he had ruined to
+gain the Chapel.  The road thence to the roof and to freedom was
+hindered by three stubborn iron doors; yet naught stood in the
+way of Sheppard's genius, and he was sensible, at last, of the
+night air chill upon his cheek.
+
+But liberty was not yet: there was still a fall of forty feet,
+and he must needs repass the wreckage of his own making to filch
+the blankets from his cell.  In terror lest he should awaken the
+Master-Side Debtors, he hastened back to the roof, lashed
+the coverlets together, and, as the city clocks clashed twelve,
+he dropped noiselessly upon the leads of a turner's house, built
+against the prison's outer wall.  Behind him Newgate was cut out
+a black mass against the sky; at his feet glimmered the garret
+window of the turner's house, and behind the winking casement he
+could see the turner's servant going to bed.  Through her chamber
+lay the road to glory and Clare Market, and breathlessly did
+Sheppard watch till the candle should be extinguished and the
+maid silenced in sleep.  In his anxiety he must tarry--tarry; and
+for a weary hour he kicked his heels upon the leads, ambition
+still too uncertain for quietude.  Yet he could not but catch a
+solace from his splendid craft.  Said he to himself:  `Am I not
+the most accomplished slip-string the world has known?  The
+broken wall of every round house in town attests my bravery. 
+Light-limbed though I be, have I not forced the impregnable
+Castle itself?  And my enemies--are they not to-day writhing in
+distress ? The head of Blueskin, that pitiful thief, quivers in
+the noose; and Jonathan Wild bleeds at the throat from the dregs
+of a coward's courage.  What a triumph shall be mine when the
+Keeper finds the stronghold tenantless!'
+
+Now, unnumbered were the affronts he had suffered from the
+Keeper's impertinence, and he chuckled aloud at his own witty
+rejoinder.  Only two days since the Gaoler had caught him
+tampering with his irons.  `Young man,' he had said, `I see what
+you have been doing, but the affair betwixt us stands thus: 
+It is your business to make your escape, and mine to take care
+you shall not.'  Jack had answered coolly enough:  `Then let's
+both mind our own business.'  And it was to some purpose that he
+had minded his.  The letter to his baffled guardian, already
+sketched in his mind, tickled him afresh, when suddenly he leaps
+to his feet and begins to force the garret window.
+
+The turner's maid was a heavy sleeper, and Sheppard crept from
+her garret to the twisted stair in peace.  Once, on a lower
+floor, his heart beat faster at the trumpetings of the turner's
+nose, but he knew no check until he reached the street door.  The
+bolt was withdrawn in an instant, but the lock was turned, and
+the key nowhere to be found.  However, though the risk of
+disturbance was greater than in Newgate, the task was light
+enough: and with an iron link from his fetter, and a rusty nail
+which had served him bravely, the box was wrenched off in a
+trice, and Sheppard stood unattended in the Old Bailey.  At first
+he was minded to make for his ancient haunts, or to conceal
+himself within the Liberty of Westminster; but the fetter-locks
+were still upon his legs, and he knew that detection would be
+easy as long as he was thus embarrassed.  Wherefore, weary and
+an-hungered, he turned his steps northward, and never rested
+until he had gained Finchley Common.
+
+At break of day, when the world re-awoke from the fear of
+thieves, he feigned a limp at a cottage door, and borrowed a
+hammer to straighten a pinching shoe.  Five minutes behind a
+hedge, and his anklets had dropped from him; and, thus a free
+man, he took to the high road.  After all he was persuaded to
+desert London and to escape a while from the sturdy embrace of
+Edgworth Bess.  Moreover, if Bess herself were in the lock-up, he
+still feared the interested affection of Mistress Maggot, that
+other doxy, whose avarice would surely drive him upon a dangerous
+enterprise; so he struck across country, and kept starvation from
+him by petty theft.  Up and down England he wandered in solitary
+insolence.  Once, saith rumour, his lithe apparition startled the
+peace of Nottingham; once, he was wellnigh caught begging wort at
+a brew-house in Thames Street.  But he might as well have
+lingered in Newgate as waste his opportunity far from the
+delights of Town; the old lust of life still impelled him, and a
+week after the hue-and-cry was raised he crept at dead of night
+down Drury Lane.  Here he found harbourage with a friendly fence,
+Wild's mortal enemy, who promised him a safe conduct across the
+seas.  But the desire of work proved too strong for prudence; and
+in a fortnight he had planned an attack on the pawnshop of one
+Rawling, at the Four Balls in Drury Lane.
+
+Sheppard, whom no house ever built with hands was strong enough
+to hold, was better skilled at breaking out than at breaking in,
+and it is remarkable that his last feat in the cracking of
+cribs was also his greatest.  Its very conception was a
+masterpiece of effrontery.  Drury Lane was the thief-catcher's
+chosen territory; yet it was the Four Balls that Jack designed
+for attack, and watches, tie-wigs, snuff-boxes were among his
+booty.  Whatever he could not crowd upon his person he presented
+to a brace of women.  Tricked out in his stolen finery, he drank
+and swaggered in Clare Market.  He was dressed in a superb suit
+of black; a diamond fawney flashed upon his finger; his light
+tie-periwig was worth no less than seven pounds; pistols,
+tortoise-shell snuff-boxes, and golden guineas jostled one
+another in his pockets.
+
+Thus, in brazen magnificence, he marched down Drury Lane on a
+certain Saturday night in November 1724.  Towards midnight he
+visited Thomas Nicks, the butcher, and having bargained for three
+ribs of beef, carried Nicks with him to a chandler's hard by,
+that they might ratify the bargain with a dram.  Unhappily, a boy
+from the `Rose and Crown' sounded the alarm; for coming into the
+chandler's for the empty ale-pots, he instantly recognised the
+incomparable gaol-thief, and lost no time in acquainting his
+master.  Now, Mr. Bradford, of the `Rose and Crown,' was a head-
+borough, who, with the zeal of a triumphant Dogberry, summoned
+the watch, and in less than half an hour Jack Sheppard was
+screaming blasphemies in a hackney-cab on his way home to
+Newgate.
+
+
+The Stone-Jug received him with deference and admiration.  Three
+hundred pounds weight of irons were put upon him for an
+adornment, and the Governor professed so keen a solicitude for
+his welfare that he never left him unattended.  There was scarce
+a beautiful woman in London who did not solace him with her
+condescension, and enrich him with her gifts.  Not only did the
+President of the Royal Academy deign to paint his portrait, but
+(a far greater honour) Hogarth made him immortal.  Even the King
+displayed a proper interest, demanding a full and precise account
+of his escapes.  The hero himself was drunk with flattery; he
+bubbled with ribaldry; he touched off the most valiant of his
+contemporaries in a ludicrous phrase.  But his chief delight was
+to illustrate his prowess to his distinguished visitors, and
+nothing pleased him better than to slip in and out of his chains.
+
+Confronted with his judge, he forthwith proposed to rid himself
+of his handcuffs, and he preserved until the fatal tree an
+illimitable pride in his artistry.  Nor would he believe in the
+possibility of death.  To the very last he was confirmed in the
+hope of pardon; but, pardon failing him, his single consolation
+was that his procession from Westminster to Newgate was the
+largest that London had ever known, and that in the crowd a
+constable broke his leg.  Even in the Condemned Hole he was
+unreconciled.  If he had broken the Castle, why should he not
+also evade the gallows?  Wherefore he resolved to carry a
+knife to Tyburn that he might cut the rope, and so, losing
+himself in the crowd, ensure escape.  But the knife was
+discovered by his warder's vigilance, and taken from him after a
+desperate struggle.  At the scaffold he behaved with admirable
+gravity: confessing the wickeder of his robberies, and asking
+pardon for his enormous crimes.  `Of two virtues,' he boasted at
+the self-same moment that the cart left him dancing without the
+music, `I have ever cherished an honest pride: never have I
+stooped to friendship with Jonathan Wild, or with any of his
+detestable thief-takers; and, though an undutiful son, I never
+damned my mother's eyes.'
+
+Thus died Jack Sheppard; intrepid burglar and incomparable
+artist, who, in his own separate ambition of prison-breaking,
+remains, and will ever remain, unrivalled.  His most brilliant
+efforts were the result neither of strength nor of cunning; for
+so slight was he of build, so deficient in muscle, that both
+Edgworth Bess and Mistress Maggot were wont to bang him to their
+own mind and purpose.  And an escape so magnificently planned, so
+bravely executed as was his from the Strong Room, is far greater
+than a mere effect of cunning.  Those mysterious gifts which
+enable mankind to batter the stone walls of a prison, or to bend
+the iron bars of a cage, were pre-eminently his.  It is also
+certain that he could not have employed his gifts in a more
+reputable profession.
+
+
+II
+LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE
+
+
+
+LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE
+
+
+Of all the heroes who have waged a private and undeclared war
+upon their neighbours, Louis-Dominique Cartouche was the most
+generously endowed.  It was but his resolute contempt for
+politics, his unswerving love of plunder for its own sake, that
+prevented him from seizing a throne or questing after the empire
+of the world.  The modesty of his ambition sets him below
+C<ae>sar, or Napoleon, but he yields to neither in the genius of
+success: whatever he would attain was his on the instant, nor did
+failure interrupt his career, until treachery, of which he went
+in perpetual terror, involved himself and his comrades in ruin. 
+His talent of generalship was unrivalled.  None of the gang was
+permitted the liberty of a free-lance.  By Cartouche was the
+order given, and so long as the chief was in repose, Paris might
+enjoy her sleep.  When it pleased him to join battle a whistle
+was enough.
+
+Now, it was revealed to his intelligence that the professional
+thief, who devoted all his days and such of his nights as were
+spared from depredation to wine and women, was more readily
+detected than the valet-de-chambre, who did but crack a
+crib or cry `Stand and deliver!' on a proper occasion. 
+Wherefore, he bade his soldiers take service in the great houses
+of Paris, that, secure of suspicion, they might still be ready to
+obey the call of duty.  Thus, also, they formed a reconnoitring
+force, whose vigilance no prize might elude; and nowhere did
+Cartouche display his genius to finer purpose than in this
+prudent disposition of his army.  It remained only to efface
+himself, and therein he succeeded admirably by never sleeping two
+following nights in the same house: so that, when Cartouche was
+the terror of Paris, when even the King trembled in his bed, none
+knew his stature nor could recognise his features.  In this
+shifting and impersonal vizard, he broke houses, picked pockets,
+robbed on the pad.  One night he would terrify the Faubourg St.
+Germain; another he would plunder the humbler suburb of St.
+Antoine; but on each excursion he was companioned by experts, and
+the map of Paris was rigidly apportioned among his followers.  To
+each district a captain was appointed, whose business it was to
+apprehend the customs of the quarter, and thus to indicate the
+proper season of attack.
+
+Ever triumphant, with yellow-boys ever jingling in his pocket,
+Cartouche lived a life of luxurious merriment.  A favourite haunt
+was a cabaret in the Rue Dauphine, chosen for the sanest of
+reasons, as his Captain Ferrand declared, that the landlady was a
+femme d'esprit.  Here he would sit with his friends and
+his women, and thereafter drive his chariot across the Pont Neuf
+to the sunnier gaiety of the Palais-Royal.  A finished dandy, he
+wore by preference a grey-white coat with silver buttons; his
+breeches and stockings were on a famous occasion of black silk;
+while a sword, scabbarded in satin, hung at his hip.
+
+But if Cartouche, like many another great man, had the faculty of
+enjoyment, if he loved wine and wit, and mistresses handsomely
+attired in damask, he did not therefore neglect his art.  When
+once the gang was perfectly ordered, murder followed robbery with
+so instant a frequency that Paris was panic-stricken.  A cry of
+`Cartouche' straightway ensured an empty street.  The King took
+counsel with his ministers: munificent rewards were offered,
+without effect.  The thief was still at work in all security, and
+it was a pretty irony which urged him to strip and kill on the
+highway one of the King's own pages.  Also, he did his work with
+so astonishing a silence, with so reasoned a certainty, that it
+seemed impossible to take him or his minions red-handed.
+
+Before all, he discouraged the use of firearms.  `A pistol,' his
+philosophy urged, `is an excellent weapon in an emergency, but
+reserve it for emergencies.  At close quarters it is none too
+sure; and why give the alarm against yourself?'  Therefore he
+armed his band with loaded staves, which sent their enemies into
+a noiseless and fatal sleep.  Thus was he wont to laugh at
+the police, deeming capture a plain impossibility.  The traitor,
+in sooth, was his single, irremediable fear, and if ever
+suspicion was aroused against a member of the gang, that member
+was put to death with the shortest shrift.
+
+It happened in the last year of Cartouche's supremacy that a
+lily-livered comrade fell in love with a pretty dressmaker.  The
+indiscretion was the less pardonable since the dressmaker had a
+horror of theft, and impudently tried to turn her lover from his
+trade.  Cartouche, discovering the backslider, resolved upon a
+public exhibition.  Before the assembled band he charged the
+miscreant with treason, and, cutting his throat, disfigured his
+face beyond recognition.  Thereafter he pinned to the corse the
+following inscription, that others might be warned by so
+monstrous an example:  `Ci git Jean Reb<a^>ti, qui a eu le
+traitement qu'il m<e'>ritait: ceux qui en feront autant que lui
+peuvent attendre le m<e^>me sort.'  Yet this was the murder that
+led to the hero's own capture and death.
+
+Du Ch<a^>telet, another craven, had already aroused the
+suspicions of his landlady: who, finding him something troubled
+the day after the traitor's death, and detecting a spot of blood
+on his neckerchief, questioned him closely.  The coward fumbling
+at an answer, she was presently convinced of his guilt, and
+forthwith denounced him for a member of the gang to M. Pacome, an
+officer of the Guard.  Straightly did M. Pac<o^>me summon Du
+Ch<a^>telet, and, assuming his guilt for certitude, bade him
+surrender his captain.  `My friend,' said he, `I know you for an
+associate of Cartouche.  Your hands are soiled with murder and
+rapine.  Confess the hiding-place of Cartouche, or in twenty-four
+hours you are broken on the wheel.'  Vainly did Du Ch<a^>telet
+protest his ignorance.  M. Pac<o^>me was resolute, and before the
+interview was over the robber confessed that Cartouche had given
+him rendezvous at nine next day.
+
+In the grey morning thirty soldiers crept forth guided by the
+traitor, `en habits de bourgeois et de chasseur,' for the house
+where Cartouche had lain.  It was an inn, kept by one Savard,
+near la Haulte Borne de la Courtille; and the soldiers, though
+they lacked not numbers, approached the chieftain's lair shaking
+with terror.  In front marched Du Ch<a^>telet; the rest followed
+in Indian file, ten paces apart.  When the traitor reached the
+house, Savard recognised him for a friend, and entertained him
+with familiar speech.  `Is there anybody upstairs?' demanded Du
+Ch<a^>telet.  `No,' replied Savard.  `Are the four women
+upstairs?' asked Du Ch<a^>telet again.  `Yes, they are,' came the
+answer: for Savard knew the password of the day.  Instantly the
+soldiers filled the tavern, and, mounting the staircase,
+discovered Cartouche with his three lieutenants, Balagny,
+Limousin, and Blanchard.  One of the four still lay abed; but
+Cartouche, with all the dandy's respect for his clothes, was
+mending his breeches.  The others hugged a flagon of wine over
+the fire.
+
+So fell the scourge of Paris into the grip of justice.  But once
+under lock and key, he displayed all the qualities which made him
+supreme.  His gaiety broke forth into a light-hearted contempt of
+his gaolers, and the Lieutenant Criminel, who would interrogate
+him, was covered with ridicule.  Not for an instant did he bow to
+fate: all shackled as he was, his legs engarlanded in heavy
+chains--which he called his garters--he tempered his merriment
+with the meditation of escape.  From the first he denied all
+knowledge of Cartouche, insisting that his name was Charles
+Bourguignon, and demanding burgundy, that he might drink to his
+country and thus prove him a true son of the soil.  Not even the
+presence of his mother and brother abashed him.  He laughed them
+away as impostors, hired by a false justice to accuse and to
+betray the innocent.  No word of confession crossed his lips, and
+he would still entertain the officers of the law with joke and
+epigram.
+
+Thus he won over a handful of the Guard, and, begging for
+solitude, he straightway set about escape with a courage and an
+address which Jack Sheppard might have envied.  His delicate ear
+discovered that a cellar lay beneath his cell; and with the old
+nail which lies on the floor of every prison he made his way
+downwards into a boxmaker's shop.  But a barking dog spoiled the
+enterprise: the boxmaker and his daughter were immediately
+abroad, and once more Cartouche was lodged in prison,
+weighted with still heavier garters.
+
+Then came a period of splendid notoriety: he held his court, he
+gave an easy rein to his wit, he received duchesses and princes
+with an air of amiable patronage.  Few there were of his
+visitants who left him without a present of gold, and thus the
+universal robber was further rewarded by his victims.  His
+portrait hung in every house, and his thin, hard face, his dry,
+small features were at last familiar to the whole of France.  M. 
+Grandval made him the hero of an epic--`Le Vice Puni.'  Even the
+theatre was dominated by his presence; and while Arlequin-
+Cartouche was greeted with thunders of applause at the Italiens,
+the more serious Fran<c,>ais set Cartouche upon the stage in
+three acts, and lavished upon its theme the resources of a then
+intelligent art.  M. Le Grand, author of the piece, deigned to
+call upon the king of thieves, spoke some words of argot with
+him, and by way of conscience money gave him a hundred crowns.
+
+Cartouche set little store by such patronage.  He pocketed the
+crowns, and then put an end to the comedy by threatening that if
+it were played again the companions of Cartouche would punish all
+such miscreants as dared to make him a laughing stock.  For
+Cartouche would endure ridicule at no man's hand.  At the very
+instant of his arrest, all bare-footed as he was, he kicked a
+constable who presumed to smile at his discomfiture.  His last
+days were spent in resolute abandonment.  True, he once
+attempted to beat out his brains with the fetters that bound
+him; true, also, he took a poison that had been secretly conveyed
+within the prison.  But both attempts failed, and, more
+scrupulously watched, he had no other course than jollity. 
+Lawyers and priests he visited with a like and bitter scorn, and
+when, on November 27, 1721, he was led to the scaffold, not a
+word of confession or contrition had been dragged from him.
+
+To the last moment he cherished the hope of rescue, and eagerly
+he scanned the crowd for the faces of his comrades.  But the
+gang, trusting to its leader's nobility, had broken its oath. 
+With contemptuous dignity Cartouche determined upon revenge:
+proudly he turned to the priest, begging a respite and the
+opportunity of speech.  Forgotten by his friends, he resolved to
+spare no single soul: he betrayed even his mistresses to justice.
+
+Of his gang, forty were in the service of Mlle. de Montpensier,
+who was already in Spain; while two obeyed the Duchesse de
+Ventadour as valets-de-pied.  His confession, in brief, was so
+dangerous a document, it betrayed the friends and servants of so
+many great houses, that the officers of the Law found safety for
+their patrons in its destruction, and not a line of the hero's
+testimony remains.  The trial of his comrades dragged on for many
+a year, and after Cartouche had been cruelly broken on the wheel,
+not a few of the gang, of which he had been at once the terror
+and inspiration, suffered a like fate.  Such the career and
+such the fitting end of the most distinguished marauder the world
+has known.  Thackeray, with no better guide than a chap-book, was
+minded to belittle him, now habiting him like a scullion, now
+sending him forth on some petty errand of cly-faking.  But for
+all Thackeray's contempt his fame is still undimmed, and he has
+left the reputation of one who, as thief unrivalled, had scarce
+his equal as wit and dandy even in the days when Louis the
+Magnificent was still a memory and an example.
+
+
+
+III
+A PARALLEL
+(SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE)
+
+
+
+A PARALLEL
+(SHEPPARD AND CARTOUCHE)
+
+IF the seventeenth century was the golden age of the hightobyman,
+it was at the advent of the eighteenth that the burglar and
+street-robber plied their trade with the most distinguished
+success, and it was the good fortune of both Cartouche and
+Sheppard to be born in the nick of time.  Rivals in talent, they
+were also near contemporaries, and the Scourge of Paris may well
+have been famous in the purlieus of Clare Market before Jack the
+Slip-String paid the last penalty of his crimes.  As each of
+these great men harboured a similar ambition, so their careers
+are closely parallel.  Born in a humble rank of life, Jack, like
+Cartouche, was the architect of his own fortune; Jack, like
+Cartouche, lived to be flattered by noble dames and to claim the
+solicitude of his Sovereign; and each owed his pre-eminence
+rather to natural genius than to a sympathetic training.
+
+But, for all the Briton's artistry, the Frenchman was in all
+points save one the superior.  Sheppard's brain carried him
+not beyond the wants of to-day and the extortions of Poll Maggot.
+
+Who knows but he might have been a respectable citizen, with
+never a chance for the display of his peculiar talent, had not
+hunger and his mistress's greed driven him upon the pad?  History
+records no brilliant robbery of his own planning, and so
+circumscribed was his imagination that he must needs pick out his
+own friends and benefactors for depredation.  His paltry sense of
+discipline permitted him to be betrayed even by his brother and
+pupil, and there was no cracksman of his time over whose head he
+held the rod of terror.  Even his hatred of Jonathan Wild was the
+result not of policy but of prejudice.  Cartouche, on the other
+hand, was always perfect when at work.  The master of himself, he
+was also the master of his fellows.  There was no detail of civil
+war that he had not made his own, and he still remains, after
+nearly two centuries, the greatest captain the world has seen. 
+Never did he permit an enterprise to fail by accident; never was
+he impelled by hunger or improvidence to fight a battle
+unprepared.  His means were always neatly fitted to their end, as
+is proved by the truth that, throughout his career, he was
+arrested but once, and then not by his own inadvertence but by
+the treachery of others.
+
+Yet from the moment of arrest Jack Sheppard asserted his
+magnificent superiority.  If Cartouche was a sorry bungler at
+prison-breaking, Sheppard was unmatched in this dangerous art. 
+The sport of the one was to break in, of the other to break
+out.  True, the Briton proved his inferiority by too frequently
+placing himself under lock and key; but you will forgive his
+every weakness for the unexampled skill wherewith he extricated
+himself from the stubbornest dungeon.  Cartouche would scarce
+have given Sheppard a menial's office in his gang.  How cordially
+Sheppard would have despised Cartouche's solitary experiment in
+escape!  To be foiled by a dog and a boxmaker's daughter!  Would
+not that have seemed contemptible to the master breaker of those
+unnumbered doors and walls which separate the Castle from the
+freedom of Newgate roof?
+
+Such, then, is the contrast between the heroes.  Sheppard claims
+our admiration for one masterpiece.  Cartouche has a sheaf of
+works, which shall carry him triumphantly to the remotest future.
+
+And when you forget a while professional rivalry, and consider
+the delicacies of leisure, you will find the Frenchman's
+greatness still indisputable.  At all points he was the prettier
+gentleman.  Sheppard, to be sure, had a sense of finery, but he
+was so unused to grandeur that vulgarity always spoiled his
+effects.  When he hied him from the pawnshop, laden with booty,
+he must e'en cram what he could not wear into his pockets; and
+doubtless his vulgar lack of reticence made detection easier. 
+Cartouche, on the other hand, had an unfailing sense of
+proportion, and was never more dressed than became the perfect
+dandy.  He was elegant, he was polished, he was joyous.  He
+drank wine, while the other soaked himself in beer; he despised
+whatever was common, while his rival knew but the coarser
+flavours of life.
+
+The one was distinguished by a boisterous humour, a swaggering
+pride in his own prowess; the wit of the other might be edged
+like a knife, nor would he ever appeal for a spectacle to the
+curiosity of the mob.  Both were men of many mistresses, but
+again in his conduct with women Cartouche showed an honester
+talent.  Sheppard was at once the prey and the whipping-block of
+his two infamous doxies, who agreed in deformity of feature as in
+contempt for their lover.  Cartouche, on the other hand, chose
+his cabaret for the wit of its patronne, and was always happy
+in the elegance and accomplishment of his companions.  One point
+of likeness remains.  The two heroes resembled each other not
+only in their profession, but in their person.  Though their
+trade demanded physical strength, each was small and slender of
+build.  `A little, slight-limbed lad,' says the historian of
+Sheppard.  `A thin, spare frame,' sings the poet of Cartouche. 
+Here, then, neither had the advantage, and if in the shades
+Cartouche despises the clumsiness and vulgarity of his rival,
+Sheppard may still remember the glory of Newgate, and twit the
+Frenchman with the barking of the boxmaker's dog.  But genius is
+the talent of the dead, and the wise, who are not partisans, will
+not deny to the one or to the other the possession of the rarer
+gift.
+
+
+
+VAUX
+
+
+VAUX
+
+TO Haggart, who babbled on the Castle Rock of Willie Wallace and
+was only nineteen when he danced without the music; to Simms,
+alias Gentleman Harry, who showed at Tyburn how a hero could
+die; to George Barrington, the incomparably witty and adroit--to
+these a full meed of honour has been paid.  Even the coarse and
+dastardly Freney has achieved, with Thackeray's aid (and Lever's)
+something of a reputation.  But James Hardy Vaux, despite his
+eloquent bid for fame, has not found his rhapsodist.  Yet a more
+consistent ruffian never pleaded for mercy.  From his early youth
+until in 1819 he sent forth his Memoirs to the world, he lived
+industriously upon the cross.  There was no racket but he worked
+it with energy and address.  Though he practised the more
+glorious crafts of pickpocket and shoplifter, he did not despise
+the begging-letter, and he suffered his last punishment for
+receiving what another's courage had conveyed.  His enterprise
+was not seldom rewarded with success, and for a decade of years
+he continued to preserve an appearance of gentility; but it is
+plain, even from his own narrative, that he was scarce an
+artist, and we shall best understand him if we recognise that he
+was a Philistine among thieves.  He lived in an age of pocket-
+picking, and skill in this branch is the true test of his time. 
+A contemporary of Barrington, he had before him the most
+brilliant of examples, which might properly have enforced the
+worth of a simple method.  But, though he constantly brags of his
+success at Drury Lane, we take not his generalities for gospel,
+and the one exploit whose credibility is enforced with
+circumstance was pitiful both in conception and performance.  A
+meeting of freeholders at the `Mermaid Tavern,' Hackney, was the
+occasion, and after drawing blank upon blank, Vaux succeeded at
+last in extracting a silver snuff-box.  Now, his clumsiness had
+suggested the use of the scissors, and the victim not only
+discovered the scission in his coat, but caught the thief with
+the implements of his art upon him.  By a miracle of impudence
+Vaux escaped conviction, but he deserved the gallows for his want
+of principle, and not even sympathy could have let drop a tear,
+had justice seized her due.  On the straight or on the cross the
+canons of art deserve respect; and a thief is great, not because
+he is a thief, but because, in filling his own pocket, he
+preserves from violence the legitimate traditions of his craft.
+
+But it was in conflict with the jewellers that Vaux best proved
+his mettle.  It was his wont to clothe himself `in the most
+elegant attire,' and on the pretence of purchase to rifle the
+shops of Piccadilly.  For this offence--`pinching' the Cant
+Dictionary calls it--he did his longest stretch of time, and here
+his admirable qualities of cunning and coolness found their most
+generous scope.  A love of fine clothes he shared with all the
+best of his kind, and he visited Mr Bilger--the jeweller who
+arrested him--magnificently arrayed.  He wore a black coat and
+waistcoat, blue pantaloons, Hessian boots, and a hat `in the
+extreme of the newest fashion.'  He was also resplendent with
+gold watch and eye-glass.  His hair was powdered, and a fawney
+sparkled on his dexter fam.  The booty was enormous, and a week
+later he revisited the shop on another errand.  This second visit
+was the one flash of genius in a somewhat drab career: the
+jeweller was so completely dumfounded, that Vaux might have got
+clean away.  But though he kept discreetly out of sight for a
+while, at last he drifted back to his ancient boozing-ken, and
+was there betrayed to a notorious thief-catcher.  The inevitable
+sentence of death followed.  It was commuted after the fashion of
+the time, and Vaux, having sojourned a while at the Hulks, sought
+for a second time the genial airs of Botany Bay.
+
+His vanity and his laziness were alike invincible.  He believed
+himself a miracle of learning as well as a perfect thief, and
+physical toil was the sole `lay' for which he professed no
+capacity.  For a while he corrected the press for a printer,
+and he roundly asserts that his knowledge of literature and of
+foreign tongues rendered him invaluable.  It was vanity again
+that induced him to assert his innocence when he was lagged for
+so vulgar a crime as stealing a wipe from a tradesman in Chancery
+Lane.  At the moment of arrest he was on his way to purchase base
+coin from a Whitechapel bit-faker: but, despite his nefarious
+errand, he is righteously wrathful at what he asserts was an
+unjust conviction, and henceforth he assumed the crown of
+martyrdom.  His first and last ambition during the intervals of
+freedom was gentility, and so long as he was not at work he lived
+the life of a respectable grocer.  Although the casual Cyprian
+flits across his page, he pursued the one flame of his life for
+the good motive, and he affects to be a very model of
+domesticity.  The sentiment of piety also was strong upon him,
+and if he did not, like the illustrious Peace, pray for his
+jailer, he rivalled the Prison Ordinary in comforting the
+condemned.  Had it only been his fate to die on the gallows, how
+unctuous had been his croak!
+
+The text of his `Memoirs' having been edited, it is scarce
+possible to define his literary talent.  The book, as it stands,
+is an excellent piece of narrative, but it loses somewhat by the
+pretence of style.  The man's invulnerable conceit prevented an
+absolute frankness, and there is little enough hilarity to
+correct the acid sentiment and the intolerable vows of
+repentance.  Again, though he knows his subject, and can
+patter flash with the best, his incorrigible respectability leads
+him to ape the manner of a Grub Street hack, and to banish to a
+vocabulary those pearls of slang which might have added vigour
+and lustre to his somewhat tiresome page.  However, the thief
+cannot escape his inevitable defects.  The vanity, the weakness,
+the sentimentality of those who are born beasts of prey, yet have
+the faculty of depredation only half-developed, are the foes of
+truth, and it is well to remember that the autobiography of a
+rascal is tainted at its source.  A congenial pickpocket,
+equipped with the self-knowledge and the candour which would
+enable him to recognise himself an outlaw and justice his enemy
+rather than an instrument of malice, would prove a Napoleon
+rather than a Vaux.  So that we must e'en accept our Newgate
+Calendar with its many faults upon its head, and be content. 
+For it takes a man of genius to write a book, and the thief who
+turns author commonly inhabits a paradise of the second-rate.
+
+
+
+GEORGE BARRINGTON
+
+
+GEORGE BARRINGTON
+
+AS Captain Hind was master of the road, George Barrington was
+(and remains for ever) the absolute monarch of pickpockets. 
+Though the art, superseding the cutting of purses, had been
+practised with courage and address for half a century before
+Barrington saw the light, it was his own incomparable genius that
+raised thievery from the dangerous valley of experiment, and set
+it, secure and honoured, upon the mountain height of perfection. 
+To a natural habit of depredation, which, being a man of letters,
+he was wont to justify, he added a sureness of hand, a fertility
+of resource, a recklessness of courage which drove his
+contemporaries to an amazed respect, and from which none but the
+Philistine will withhold his admiration.  An accident discovered
+his taste and talent.  At school he attempted to kill a
+companion--the one act of violence which sullies a strangely
+gentle career; and outraged at the affront of a flogging, he fled
+with twelve guineas and a gold repeater watch.  A vulgar theft
+this, and no presage of future greatness; yet it proves the
+fearless greed, the contempt of private property, which mark
+as with a stigma the temperament of the prig.  His faculty did
+not rust long for lack of use, and at Drogheda, when he was but
+sixteen, he encountered one Price, half barnstormer, half thief. 
+Forthwith he embraced the twin professions, and in the interlude
+of more serious pursuits is reported to have made a respectable
+appearance as Jaffier in Venice Preserved.  For a while he
+dreamed of Drury Lane and glory; but an attachment for Miss
+Egerton, the Belvidera to his own Jaffier, was more costly than
+the barns of Londonderry warranted, and, with Price for a
+colleague, he set forth on a tour of robbery, merely interrupted
+through twenty years by a few periods of enforced leisure.
+
+His youth, indeed, was his golden age.  For four years he
+practised his art, chilled by no shadow of suspicion, and his
+immunity was due as well to his excellent bearing as to his
+sleight of hand.  In one of the countless chap-books which
+dishonour his fame, he is unjustly accused of relying for his
+effects upon an elaborate apparatus, half knife, half scissors,
+wherewith to rip the pockets of his victims.  The mere backbiting
+of envy!  An artistic triumph was never won save by legitimate
+means; and the hero who plundered the Dulce of L--r at Ranelagh,
+who emptied the pockets of his acquaintance without fear of
+exposure, who all but carried off the priceless snuff-box of
+Count Orloff, most assuredly followed his craft in full
+simplicity and with a proper scorn of clumsy artifice.  At
+his first appearance he was the master, sumptuously apparelled,
+with Price for valet.  At Dublin his birth and quality were never
+questioned, and when he made a descent upon London it was in
+company with Captain W.  H--n, who remained for years his loyal
+friend.  He visited Brighton as the chosen companion of Lord
+Ferrers and the wicked Lord Lyttelton.  His manners and learning
+were alike irresistible.  Though the picking of pockets was the
+art and interest of his life, he was on terms of easy familiarity
+with light literature, and he considered no toil too wearisome if
+only his conversation might dazzle his victims.  Two maxims he
+charactered upon his heart: the one, never to run a large risk
+for a small gain; the other, never to forget the carriage and
+diction of a gentleman.
+
+He never stooped to pilfer, until exposure and decay had weakened
+his hand.  In his first week at Dublin he carried off <Pd>1000,
+and it was only his fateful interview with Sir John Fielding that
+gave him poverty for a bedfellow.  Even at the end, when he slunk
+from town to town, a notorious outlaw, he had inspirations of his
+ancient magnificence, and--at Chester--he eluded the vigilance of
+his enemies and captured <Pd>600, wherewith he purchased some
+months of respectability.  Now, respectability was ever dear to
+him, and it was at once his pleasure and profit to live in the
+highest society.  Were it not blasphemy to sully Barrington with
+slang you would call him a member of the swell-mob, but,
+having cultivated a grave and sober style for himself, he
+recoiled in horror from the flash lingo, and his susceptibility
+demands respect.
+
+He kept a commonplace book!  Was ever such thrift in a thief? 
+Whatever images or thoughts flashed through his brain, he seized
+them on paper, even `amidst the jollity of a tavern, or in the
+warmth of an interesting conversation.'  Was it then strange that
+he triumphed as a man of fashionable and cultured leisure?  He
+would visit Ranelagh with the most distinguished, and turn a
+while from epigram and jest to empty the pocket of a rich
+acquaintance.  And ever with so tactful a certainty, with so fine
+a restraint of the emotions, that suspicion was preposterous.  To
+catalogue his exploits is superfluous, yet let it be recorded
+that once he went to Court, habited as a clergyman, and came home
+the richer for a diamond order, Lord C--'s proudest decoration. 
+Even the assault upon Prince Orloff was nobly planned. 
+Barrington had precise intelligence of the marvellous snuff-box--
+the Empress's own gift to her lover; he knew also how he might
+meet the Prince at Drury Lane; he had even discovered that the
+Prince for safety hid the jewel in his vest.  But the Prince felt
+the Prig's hand upon the treasure, and gave an instant alarm. 
+Over-confidence, maybe, or a too liberal dinner was the cause of
+failure, and Barrington, surrounded in a moment, was speedily in
+the lock-up.  It was the first rebuff that the hero had received,
+and straightway his tact and ingenuity left him.  The
+evidence was faulty, the prosecution declined, and naught was
+necessary for escape save presence of mind.  Even friends were
+staunch, and had Barrington told his customary lie, his character
+had gone unsullied.  Yet having posed for his friends as a
+student of the law, at Bow Street he must needs declare himself a
+doctor, and the needless discrepancy ruined him.  Though he
+escaped the gallows, there was an end to the diversions of
+intellect and fashion; as he discovered when he visited the House
+of Lords to hear an appeal, and Black Rod ejected him at the
+persuasion of Mr. G--.  As yet unused to insult, he threatened
+violence against the aggressor, and finding no bail he was sent
+on his first imprisonment to the Bridewell in Tothill Fields. 
+Rapid, indeed, was the descent.  At the first grip of adversity,
+he forgot his cherished principles, and two years later the
+loftiest and most elegant gentlemen that ever picked a pocket was
+at the Hulks--for robbing a harlot at Drury Lane!  Henceforth,
+his insolence and artistry declined, and, though to the last
+there were intervals of grandeur, he spent the better part of
+fifteen years in the commission of crimes, whose very littleness
+condemned them.  At last an exile from St. James's and Ranelagh,
+he was forced into a society which still further degraded him. 
+Hitherto he had shunned the society of professed thieves; in his
+golden youth he had scorned to shelter him in the flash kens,
+which were the natural harbours of pickpockets.  But now, says
+his biographer, he began to seek evil company, and, the
+victim of his own fame, found safety only in obscene concealment.
+
+At the Hulks he recovered something of his dignity, and
+discretion rendered his first visit brief enough.  Even when he
+was committed on a second offence, and had attempted suicide, he
+was still irresistible, and he was discharged with several years
+of imprisonment to run.  But, in truth, he was born for honour
+and distinction, and common actions, common criminals, were in
+the end distasteful to him.  In his heyday he stooped no further
+than to employ such fences as might profitably dispose of his
+booty, and the two partners of his misdeeds were both remarkable.
+
+James, the earlier accomplice affected clerical attire, and in
+1791 `was living in a Westphalian monastery, to which he some
+years ago retired, in an enviable state of peace and penitence,
+respected for his talents, and loved for his amiable manners, by
+which he is distinguished in an eminent degree.'  The other
+ruffian, Lowe by name, was known to his own Bloomsbury Square for
+a philanthropic and cultured gentleman, yet only suicide saved
+him from the gallows.  And while Barrington was wise in the
+choice of his servants, his manners drove even strangers to
+admiration.  Policemen and prisoners were alike anxious to do him
+honour.  Once when he needed money for his own defence, his
+brother thieves, whom he had ever shunned and despised, collected
+<Pd>100 for the captain of their guild.  Nor did gaoler and judge
+ever forget the respect due to a gentleman.  When Barrington
+was tried and condemned for the theft of Mr. Townsend's watch at
+Enfield Races--September 15, 1790, was the day of his last
+transgression--one knows not which was the more eloquent in his
+respect, the judge or the culprit.
+
+But it was not until the pickpocket set out for Botany Bay that
+he took full advantage of his gentlemanly bearing.  To thrust
+`Mr.' Barrington into the hold was plainly impossible, even
+though transportation for seven years was his punishment. 
+Wherefore he was admitted to the boatswain's mess, was allowed as
+much baggage as a first-class passenger, and doubtless beguiled
+the voyage (for others) with the information of a well-stored
+mind.  By an inspiration of luck he checked a mutiny, holding the
+quarter-deck against a mob of ruffians with no weapon but a
+marline-spike.  And hereafter, as he tells you in his `Voyage to
+New South Wales,' he was accorded the fullest liberty to come or
+go.  He visited many a foreign port with the officers of the
+ship; he packed a hundred note-books with trite and superfluous
+observations; he posed, in brief, as the captain of the ship
+without responsibility.  Arrived at Port Jackson, he was
+acclaimed a hero, and received with obsequious solicitude by the
+Governor, who promised that his `future situation should be such
+as would render his banishment from England as little irksome as
+possible.'  Forthwith he was appointed high constable of
+Paramatta, and, like Vautrin, who might have taken the
+youthful Barrington for another Rastignac, he ended his days the
+honourable custodian of less fortunate convicts.  Or, as a
+broadside ballad has it,
+
+     He left old Drury's flash purlieus,
+          To turn at last a copper.
+
+
+Never did he revert to his ancient practice.  If in his youth he
+had lived the double-life with an effrontery and elegance which
+Brodie himself never attained, henceforth his career was single
+in its innocence.  He became a prig in the less harmful and more
+offensive sense.  After the orthodox fashion he endeared himself
+to all who knew him, and ruled Paramatta with an equable
+severity.  Having cultivated the humanities for the base purposes
+of his trade, he now devoted himself to literature with an energy
+of dulness, becoming, as it were, a liberal education
+personified.  His earlier efforts had been in verse, and you
+wonder that no enterprising publisher had ventured on a limited
+edition.  Time was he composed an ode to Light, and once
+recovering from a fever contracted at Ballyshannon, he addressed
+a few burning lines to Hygeia:
+
+     Hygeia! thou whose eyes display
+     The lustre of meridian day;
+
+and so on for endless couplets.  Then, had he not celebrated in
+immortal verse his love for Miss Egerton, untimely drowned in the
+waters of the Boyne?  But now, as became the Constable of
+Paramatta, he chose the sterner medium, and followed up his
+`Voyage to New South Wales' with several exceeding trite and
+valuable histories.
+
+His most ambitious work was dedicated in periods of unctuous
+piety to his Majesty King George III., and the book's first
+sentence is characteristic of his method and sensibility:  `In
+contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is
+alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' 
+Would you read further?  Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin
+goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as
+a geographical treatise.  His first masterpiece was translated
+into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war
+with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable
+biography.  Was ever thief treated with so grave a consideration?
+
+Then another work was prefaced by the Right Hon. William Eden,
+and all were `embellished with beautiful coloured plates,' and
+ran through several editions.  Once only did he return to poetry,
+the favoured medium of his youth, and he returned to write an
+imperishable line.  Even then his pedantry persuaded him to
+renounce the authorship, and to disparage the achievement.  The
+occasion was the opening of a theatre at Sydney, wherein the
+parts were sustained by convicts.  The cost of admission to the
+gallery was one shilling, paid in money, flour, meat, or spirits.
+
+The play was entitled The Revenge and the Hotel, and
+Barrington provided the prologue, which for one passage is for
+ever memorable.  Thus it runs:
+
+     From distant climes, o'er widespread seas, we come,
+     Though not with much eclat or beat of drum;
+     True patriots we, for be it understood,
+     We left our country for our country's good.
+     No private views disgraced our generous zeal,
+     What urged our travels was our country's weal;
+     And none will doubt, but that our emigration
+     Has proved most useful to the British nation.
+
+
+`We left our country for our country's good.'  That line, thrown
+fortuitously into four hundred pages of solid prose, has emerged
+to become the common possession of Fleet Street.  It is the man's
+one title to literary fame, for spurning the thievish practice he
+knew so well, he was righteously indignant when The London Spy
+was fathered upon him.  Though he emptied his contemporary's
+pockets of many thousands, he enriched the Dictionary of
+Quotations with one line, which will be repeated so long as there
+is human hand to wield a pen.  And, if the High Constable of
+Paramatta was tediously respectable, George Barrington, the Prig,
+was a man of genius.
+
+
+
+THE SWITCHER
+AND GENTLEMAN HARRY
+
+I
+THE SWITCHER
+
+
+
+THE SWITCHER
+
+DAVID HAGGART was born at Canonmills, with no richer birthright
+than thievish fingers and a left hand of surpassing activity. 
+The son of a gamekeeper, he grew up a long-legged, red-headed
+callant, lurking in the sombre shadow of the Cowgate, or like the
+young Sir Walter, championing the Auld Town against the New on
+the slopes of Arthur's Seat.  Kipping was his early sin; but the
+sportsman's instinct, born of his father's trade, was so strong
+within him, that he pinched a fighting cock before he was
+breeched, and risked the noose for horse-stealing when marbles
+should have engrossed his boyish fancy.  Turbulent and lawless,
+he bitterly resented the intolerable restraint of a tranquil
+life, and, at last, in the hope of a larger liberty, he enlisted
+for a drummer in the Norfolk Militia, stationed at the moment in
+Edinburgh Castle.  A brief, insubordinate year, misspent in his
+country's service, proved him hopeless of discipline: he claimed
+his discharge, and henceforth he was free to follow the one craft
+for which nature and his own ambition had moulded him.
+
+
+Like Chatterton, like Rimbaud, Haggart came into the full
+possession of his talent while still a child.  A Barrington of
+fourteen, he knew every turn and twist of his craft, before he
+escaped from school.  His youthful necessities were munificently
+supplied by facile depredation, and the only hindrance to
+immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where he might
+fence his plunder.  Meanwhile he painted his soul black with
+wickedness.  Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable
+conduct of his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of
+Leith or the Golden Acre.  Though he knew not the seduction of
+whisky, he missed never a dance nor a raffle, joining the frolics
+of prigs and callets in complete forgetfulness of the shorter
+catechism.  In vain the kirk compared him to a `bottle in the
+smoke'; in vain the minister whispered of hell and the gallows;
+his heart hardened, as his fingers grew agile, and when, at
+sixteen, he left his father's house for a sporting life, he had
+not his equal in the three kingdoms for cunning and courage.
+
+His first accomplice was Barney M'Guire, who--until a fourteen
+stretch sent him to Botany Bay--played Clytus to David's
+Alexander, and it was at Portobello Races that their brilliant
+partnership began.  Hitherto Haggart had worked by stealth; he
+had tracked his booty under the cloud of night.  Now was the
+moment to prove his prowess in the eye of day, to break with a
+past which he already deemed ignoble.  His heart leaped with the
+occasion: he tackled his adventure with the hot-head energy
+of a new member, big with his maiden speech.  The victim was
+chosen in an instant: a backer, whose good fortune had broken the
+bookmakers.  There was no thief on the course who did not wait,
+in hungry appetence, the sportsman's descent from the stand; yet
+the novice outstripped them all.  `I got the first dive at his
+keek-cloy,' he writes in his simple, heroic style, `and was so
+eager on my prey, that I pulled out the pocket along with the
+money, and nearly upset the gentleman.'  A steady brain saved him
+from the consequence of an o'erbuoyant enthusiasm.  The notes
+were passed to Barney in a flash, and when the sportsman turned
+upon his assailant, Haggart's hands were empty.
+
+Thereupon followed an infinite series of brilliant exploits. 
+With Barney to aid, he plundered the Border like a reiver.  He
+stripped the yeomen of Tweedside with a ferocity which should
+have avenged the disgrace of Flodden.  More than once he
+ransacked Ecclefechan, though it is unlikely that he emptied the
+lean pocket of Thomas Carlyle.  There was not a gaff from
+Newcastle to the Tay which he did not haunt with sedulous
+perseverance; nor was he confronted with failure, until his
+figure became a universal terror.  His common method was to price
+a horse, and while the dealer showed Barney the animal's teeth,
+Haggart would slip under the uplifted arm, and ease the blockhead
+of his blunt.  Arrogant in his skill, delighted with his
+manifold triumphs, Haggart led a life of unbroken prosperity
+under the brisk air of heaven, and, despite the risk of his
+profession, he remained two years a stranger to poverty and
+imprisonment.  His worst mishap was to slip his forks into an
+empty pocket, or to encounter in his cups a milvadering horse-
+dealer; but his joys were free and frank, while he exulted in his
+success with a boyish glee.  `I was never happier in all my life
+than when I fingered all this money,' he exclaims when he had
+captured the comfortable prize of two hundred pounds.  And then
+he would make merry at Newcastle or York, forgetting the knowing
+ones for a while, going abroad in white cape and tops, and
+flicking his leg like a gentleman with a dandy whip.  But at last
+Barney and a wayward ambition persuaded him to desert his proper
+craft for the greater hazard of cracking a crib, and thus he was
+involved in his ultimate ruin.  He incurred and he deserved the
+untoward fate of those who overlook their talents' limitation;
+and when this master of pickpockets followed Barney through the
+window of a secluded house upon the York Road, he might already
+have felt the noose tightening at his neck.  The immediate reward
+of this bungled attack was thirty pounds, but two days later he
+was committed with Barney to the Durham Assizes, where he
+exchanged the obscurity of the perfect craftsman for the
+notoriety of the dangerous gaol-bird.
+
+For the moment, however, he recovered his freedom: breaking
+prison, he straightway conveyed a fiddlestick to his comrade, and
+in a twinkling was at Newcastle again, picking up purses well
+lined with gold, and robbing the bumpkins of their scouts and
+chats.  But the time of security was overpast.  Marked and
+suspicious, he began to fear the solitude of the country; he left
+the horse-fair for the city, and sought in the budging-kens of
+Edinburgh the secrecy impossible on the hill-side.  A clumsy
+experiment in shop-lifting doubled his danger, and more than once
+he saw the inside of the police-office.  Henceforth, he was free
+of the family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash
+houses of Leith and the Grassmarket.  With Jean Johnston, the
+blowen of his choice, he smeared his hands with the squalor of
+petty theft, and the drunken recklessness wherewith he swaggered
+it abroad hastened his approaching downfall.
+
+With a perpetual anxiety to avoid the nippers his artistry
+dwindled.  The left hand, invincible on the Cheviots, seemed no
+better than a bunch of thumbs in the narrow ways of Edinburgh;
+and after innumerable misadventures Haggart was safely lodged in
+Dumfries gaol.  No sooner was he locked within his cell than his
+restless brain planned a generous escape.  He would win liberty
+for his fellows as well as for himself, and after a brief council
+a murderous plot was framed and executed.  A stone slung in a
+handkerchief sent Morrin, the gaoler, to sleep; the keys found on
+him opened the massy doors; and Haggart was free with a
+reward set upon his head.  The shock of the enterprise restored
+his magnanimity.  Never did he display a finer bravery than in
+this spirited race for his life, and though three counties were
+aroused he doubled and ducked to such purpose that he outstripped
+John Richardson himself with all his bloodhounds, and two days
+later marched into Carlisle disguised in the stolen rags of a
+potato-bogle.
+
+During the few months that remained to him of life he embarked
+upon a veritable Odyssey: he scoured Scotland from the Border to
+St. Andrews, and finally contrived a journey oversea to Ireland,
+where he made the name of Daniel O'Brien a terror to well-doers. 
+Insolent and careless, he lurched from prison to prison; now it
+was Armagh that held him, now Downpatrick, until at last he was
+thrust on a general charge of vagabondage and ill-company into
+Kilmainham, which has since harboured many a less valiant
+adventurer than David Haggart.  Here the culminating disgrace
+overtook him: he was detected in the prison yard by his ancient
+enemy, John Richardson, of Dumfries, who dragged him back to
+Scotland heavily shackled and charged with murder.  So nimble had
+he proved himself in extrication, that his captors secured him
+with pitiless severity; round his waist he carried an iron belt,
+whereto were padlocked the chains, clanking at his wrists and
+ankles.  Thus tortured and helpless, he was fed `like a sucking
+turkey in Bedlam'; but his sorrows vanished, and his dying
+courage revived at sight of the torchlight procession, which set
+forth from Dumfries to greet his return.
+
+His coach was hustled by a mob, thousands strong, eager to catch
+sight of Haggart the Murderer, and though the spot where he slew
+Morrin was like fire beneath his passing feet, he carried to his
+cell a heart and a brain aflame with gratified vanity.  His guilt
+being patent, reprieve was as hopeless as acquittal, and after
+the assured condemnation he spent his last few days with what
+profit he might in religious and literary exercises.  He composed
+a memoir, which is a model of its kind; so diligently did he make
+his soul, that he could appear on the scaffold in a chastened
+spirit of prayerful gratitude; and, being an eminent scoundrel,
+he seemed a proper subject for the ministrations of Mr. George
+Combe.  `That is the one thing I did not know before,' he
+confessed with an engaging modesty, when his bumps were squeezed,
+and yet he was more than a match for the amiable phrenologist,
+whose ignorance of mankind persuaded him to believe that an
+illiterate felon could know himself and analyse his character.
+
+His character escaped his critics as it escaped himself.  Time
+was when George Borrow, that other picaroon, surprised the
+youthful David, thinking of Willie Wallace upon the Castle Rock,
+and Lavengro's romantic memory transformed the raw-boned
+pickpocket into a monumental hero, who lacked nothing save a vast
+theatre to produce a vast effect.  He was a Tamerlane,
+robbed of his opportunity; a valiant warrior, who looked in vain
+for a battlefield; a marauder who climbed the scaffold not for
+the magnitude, but for the littleness of his sins.  Thus Borrow,
+in complete misunderstanding of the rascal's qualities.
+
+Now, Haggart's ambition was as circumscribed as his ability.  He
+died, as he was born, an expert cly-faker, whose achievements in
+sleight of hand are as yet unparalleled.  Had the world been one
+vast breast pocket his fish-hook fingers would have turned it
+inside out.  But it was not his to mount a throne, or overthrow a
+dynasty.  `My forks,' he boasted, `are equally long, and they
+never fail me.'  That is at once the reason and the justification
+of his triumph.  Born with a consummate artistry tingling at his
+finger-tips, how should he escape the compulsion of a glorious
+destiny?  Without fumbling or failure he discovered the single
+craft for which fortune had framed him, and he pursued it with a
+courage and an industry which gave him not a kingdom, but fame
+and booty, exceeding even his greedy aspiration.  No Tamerlane
+he, questing for a continent, but David Haggart, the man with the
+long forks, happy if he snatched his neighbour's purse.
+
+Before all things he respected the profession which his left hand
+made inevitable, and which he pursued with unconquerable pride. 
+Nor in his inspired youth was plunder his sole ambition: he
+cultivated the garden of his style with the natural zeal of
+the artist; he frowned upon the bungler with a lofty contempt. 
+His materials were simplicity itself: his forks, which were
+always with him, and another's well-filled pocket, since,
+sensible of danger, he cared not to risk his neck for a purse
+that did not contain so much as would `sweeten a grawler.'  At
+its best, his method was always witty--that is the single word
+which will characterise it--witty as a piece of Heine's prose,
+and as dangerous.  He would run over a man's pockets while he
+spoke with him, returning what he chose to discard without the
+lightest breath of suspicion.  `A good workman,' his
+contemporaries called him; and they thought it a shame for him to
+be idle.  Moreover, he did not blunder unconsciously upon his
+triumph; he tackled the trade in so fine a spirit of analysis
+that he might have been the very Aristotle of his science.  `The
+keek-cloy,' he wrote, in his hints to young sportsmen, `is easily
+picked.  If the notes are in the long fold just tip them the
+forks; but if there is a purse or open money in the case, you
+must link it.'  The breast-pocket, on the other hand, is a
+severer test.  `Picking the suck is sometimes a kittle job,'
+again the philosopher speaks.  `If the coat is buttoned it must
+be opened by slipping past.  Then bring the lil down between the
+flap of the coat and the body, keeping your spare arm across your
+man's breast, and so slip it to a comrade; then abuse the fellow
+for jostling you.'
+
+
+Not only did he master the tradition of thievery; he vaunted his
+originality with the familiar complacence of the scoundrel. 
+Forgetting that it was by burglary that he was undone, he
+explains for his public glorification that he was wont to enter
+the houses of Leith by forcing the small window above the outer
+door.  This artifice, his vanity grumbles, is now common; but he
+would have all the world understand that it was his own
+invention, and he murmurs with the pedantry of the convicted
+criminal that it is now set forth for the better protection of
+honest citizens.  No less admirable in his own eyes was that
+other artifice which induced him to conceal such notes as he
+managed to filch in the collar of his coat.  Thus he eluded the
+vigilance of the police, which searched its prey in those days
+with a sorry lack of cunning.  In truth, Haggart's wits were as
+nimble as his fingers, and he seldom failed to render a
+profitable account of his talents.  He beguiled one of his
+sojourns in gaol by manufacturing tinder wherewith to light the
+prisoners' pipes, and it is not astonishing that he won a general
+popularity.  In Ireland, when the constables would take him for a
+Scot, he answered in high Tipperary, and saved his skin for a
+while by a brogue which would not have shamed a modern patriot. 
+But quick as were his wits, his vanity always outstripped them,
+and no hero ever bragged of his achievements with a louder
+effrontery.
+
+
+     Now all you ramblers in mourning go,
+     For the prince of ramblers is lying low,
+     And all you maidens that love the game,
+     Put on your mourning veils again.
+
+Thus he celebrated his downfall in a ballad that has the true
+Newgate ring, and verily in his own eyes he was a hero who
+carried to the scaffold a dauntless spirit unstained by
+treachery.
+
+He believed himself an adept in all the arts; as a squire of
+dames he held himself peerless, and he assured the ineffable
+Combe, who recorded his flippant utterance with a credulous
+respect, that he had sacrificed hecatombs of innocent virgins to
+his importunate lust.  Prose and verse trickled with equal
+facility from his pen, and his biography is a masterpiece. 
+Written in the pedlar's French as it was misspoken in the hells
+of Edinburgh, it is a narrative of uncommon simplicity and
+directness, marred now and again by such superfluous reflections
+as are the natural result of thievish sentimentality.  He tells
+his tale without paraphrase or adornment, and the worthy Writer
+to the Signet, who prepared the work for the Press, would have
+asked three times the space to record one-half the adventures. 
+`I sunk upon it with my forks and brought it with me'; `We
+obtained thirty-three pounds by this affair'--is there not the
+stalwart flavour of the epic in these plain, unvarnished
+sentences?
+
+His other accomplishments are pallid in the light of his
+brilliant left hand.  Once, at Derry--he attended a cock-
+fight, and beguiled an interval by emptying the pockets of a
+lucky bookmaker.  An expert, who watched the exploit in
+admiration, could not withhold a compliment.  `You are the
+Switcher,' he exclaimed; `some take all, but you leave nothing.' 
+And it is as the Switcher that Haggart keeps his memory green.
+
+
+
+II
+GENTLEMAN HARRY
+
+GENTLEMAN HARRY
+
+`DAMN ye both! stop, or I will blow your brains out!'  Thus it
+was that Harry Simms greeted his victims, proving in a phrase
+that the heroic age of the rumpad was no more.  Forgotten the
+debonair courtesy of Claude Duval!  Forgotten the lightning wit,
+the swift repartee of the incomparable Hind!  No longer was the
+hightoby-gloak a `gentleman' of the road; he was a butcher, if
+not a beggar, on horseback; a braggart without the courage to
+pull a trigger; a swashbuckler, oblivious of that ancient style
+which converted the misery of surrender into a privilege.  Yet
+Harry Simms, the supreme adventurer of his age, was not without
+distinction; his lithe form and his hard-ridden horse were the
+common dread of England; his activity was rewarded with a
+princely treasure; and if his method were lacking in urbanity,
+the excuse is that he danced not to the brilliant measure of the
+Cavaliers, but limped to the clumsy fiddle-scraping of the early
+Georges.
+
+At Eton, where a too-indulgent grandmother had placed him,
+he ransacked the desks of his school-fellows, and avenged a
+birching by emptying his master's pockets.  Wherefore he lost the
+hope of a polite education, and instead of proceeding with a
+clerkly dignity to King's College, in the University of
+Cambridge, he was ignominiously apprenticed to a breeches-maker. 
+The one restraint was as irksome as the other, and Harry Simms
+abandoned the needle, as he had scorned the grammar, to go upon
+the pad.  Though his early companions were scragged at Tyburn,
+the light-fingered rascal was indifferent to their fate, and
+squandering such booty as fell to his share, he bravely `turned
+out' for more.  Tottenham Court Fair was the theatre of his
+childish exploits, and there he gained some little skill in the
+picking of pockets.  But a spell of bad trade brought him to
+poverty, and he attempted to replenish an empty pocket by the
+childish expedient of a threatening letter.
+
+The plan was conceived and executed with a futility which ensured
+an instant capture.  The bungler chose a stranger at haphazard,
+commanding him, under penalty of death, to lay five guineas upon
+a gun in Tower Wharf; the guineas were cunningly deposited, and
+the rascal, caught with his hand upon the booty, was committed to
+Newgate.  Youth, and the intercession of his grandmother,
+procured a release, unjustified by the infamous stupidity of the
+trick.  Its very clumsiness should have sent him over sea; and it
+is wonderful that from a beginning of so little promise, he
+should have climbed even the first slopes of greatness.  However,
+the memory of gaol forced him to a brief interlude of honesty;
+for a while he wore the pink coat of Colonel Cunningham's
+postillion, and presently was promoted to the independence of a
+hackney coach.
+
+Thus employed, he became acquainted with the famous Cyprians of
+Covent Garden, who, loving him for his handsome face and
+sprightly gesture, seduced him to desert his cab for an easier
+profession.  So long as the sky was fair, he lived under their
+amiable protection; but the summer having chased the smarter
+gentry from town, the ladies could afford him no more than would
+purchase a horse and a pair of pistols, so that Harry was
+compelled to challenge fortune on the high road.  His first
+journey was triumphantly successful.  A post-chaise and a couple
+of coaches emptied their wealth into his hands, and, riding for
+London, he was able to return the favours lavished upon him by
+Covent Garden.  At the first touch of gold he was transformed to
+a finished blade.  He purchased himself a silver-hilted sword,
+which he dangled over a discreet suit of black velvet; a
+prodigious run of luck at the gaming-tables kept his purse well
+lined; and he made so brilliant an appearance in his familiar
+haunts that he speedily gained the name of `Gentleman Harry.' 
+But the money, lightly won, was lightly spent.  The tables took
+back more than they gave, and before long Simms was astride his
+horse again, flourishing his irons, and crying:  `Stand and
+deliver'! upon every road in England.
+
+Epping Forest was his general hunting-ground, but his enterprise
+took him far afield, and if one night he galloped by starlight
+across Bagshot Heath, another he was holding up the York stage
+with unbridled insolence.  He robbed, he roared, he blustered
+with praiseworthy industry; and good luck coming to the aid of
+caution, he escaped for a while the necessary punishment of his
+crimes.  It was on Stockbridge Downs that he met his first check.
+
+He had stopped a chariot, and came off with a hatful of gold, but
+the victims, impatient of disaster, raised the county, and
+Gentleman Harry was laid by the heels.  Never at a loss, he
+condescended to a cringing hypocrisy: he whined, he whimpered, he
+babbled of reform, he plied his prosecutors with letters so
+packed with penitence, that they abandoned their case, and in a
+couple of days Simms had eased a collector at Eversey Bank of
+three hundred pounds.  For this enterprise two others climbed the
+gallows, and the robber's pride in his capture was miserably
+lessened by the shedding of innocent blood.
+
+But he forgot his remorse as speedily as he dissipated his money,
+and sentimentality neither damped his enjoyment nor restrained
+his energy.  Even his brief visits to London were turned to the
+best account; and, though he would have the world believe him a
+mere voluptuary, his eye was bent sternly upon business.  If
+he did lose his money in a gambling hell, he knew who won it, and
+spoke with his opponent on the homeward way.  In his eyes a
+fuddled rake was always fair game, and the stern windows of St.
+Clement's Church looked down upon many a profitable adventure. 
+His most distinguished journey was to Ireland, whither he set
+forth to find a market for his stolen treasure.  But he
+determined that the road should bear its own charges, and he
+reached Dublin a richer man than he left London.  In three months
+he was penniless, but he did not begin trade again until he had
+recrossed the Channel, and, having got to work near Chester, he
+returned to the Piazza fat with bank-notes.
+
+With success his extravagance increased, and, living the life of
+a man about town, he was soon harassed by debt.  More than once
+he was lodged in the Marshalsea, and as his violent temper
+resented the interference of a dun, he became notorious for his
+assaults upon sheriff's officers.  And thus his poor skill grew
+poorer: forgetting his trade, he expected that brandy would ease
+his embarrassment.  At last, sodden with drink, he enlisted in
+the Guards, from which regiment he deserted, only to be pressed
+aboard a man-of-war.  Freed by a clever trick, he took to the
+road again, until a paltry theft from a barber transported him to
+Maryland.  There he turned sailor, and his ship, The Two
+Sisters, being taken by a privateer, he contrived to scramble
+into Portugal, whence he made his way back to England, and
+to the only adventure of which he was master.  He landed with no
+more money than the price of a pistol, but he prigged a prancer
+at Bristol horsefair, and set out upon his last journey.  The
+tide of his fortune was at flood.  He crammed his pockets with
+watches; he was owner of enough diamonds to set up shop in a
+fashionable quarter; of guineas he had as many as would support
+his magnificence for half a year; and at last he resolved to quit
+the road, and to live like the gentleman he was.  To this
+prudence he was the more easily persuaded, because not only were
+the thief-takers eager for his capture, but he was a double-dyed
+deserter, whose sole chance of quietude was a decent obscurity.
+
+His resolution was taken at St. Albans, and over a comfortable
+dinner he pictured a serene and uneventful future.  On the morrow
+he would set forth to Dublin, sell his handsome stock of jewels,
+and forget that the cart ever lumbered up Tyburn Hill.  So elated
+was he with his growing virtue, that he called for a second
+bottle, and as the port heated his blood his fingers tingled for
+action.  A third bottle proved beyond dispute that only the
+craven were idle; `and why,' he exclaimed, generous with wine,
+`should the most industrious ruffler of England condescend to
+inaction?'  Instantly he summoned the ostler, screaming for his
+horse, and before Redburn he had emptied four pockets, and had
+exchanged his own tired jade for a fresh and willing beast. 
+Still exultant in his contempt of cowardice, he faced the
+Warrington stage, and made off with his plunder at a drunken
+gallop.  Arrived at Dunstable, he was so befogged with liquor and
+pride, that he entered the `Bull Inn,' the goal of the very coach
+he had just encountered.  He had scarce called for a quartern of
+brandy when the robbed passengers thronged into the kitchen; and
+the fright gave him enough sobriety to leave his glass untasted,
+and stagger to his horse.  In a wild fury of arrogance and
+terror, of conflicting vice and virtue, he pressed on to
+Hockcliffe, where he took refuge from the rain, and presently,
+fuddled with more brandy, he fell asleep over the kitchen fire.
+
+By this time the hue and cry was raised; and as the hero lay
+helpless in the corner three troopers burst into the inn,
+levelled their pistols at his head, and threatened death if he
+put his hand to his pocket.  Half asleep, and wholly drunk, he
+made not he smallest show of resistance; he surrendered all his
+money, watches, and diamonds, save a little that was sewn into
+his neckcloth, and sulkily crawled up to his bed-chamber. 
+Thither the troopers followed him, and having restored some nine
+pounds at his urgent demand, they watched his heavy slumbers. 
+For all his brandy Simms slept but uneasily, and awoke in the
+night sick with the remorse which is bred of ruined plans and a
+splitting head.  He got up wearily, and sat over the fire `a good
+deal chagrined,' to quote his own simple phrase, at his miserable
+capture.  Escape seemed hopeless indeed; there crouched the
+vigilant troopers, scowling on their prey.  A thousand plans
+chased each other through the hero's fuddled brain, and at last
+he resolved to tempt the cupidity of his guardians, and to make
+himself master of their fire-arms.  There were still left him a
+couple of seals, one gold, the other silver, and watching his
+opportunity, Simms flung them with a flourish in the fire.  It
+fell out as he expected; the hungry troopers made a dash to save
+the trinkets; the prisoner seized a brace of pistols and leapt to
+the door.  But, alas, the pistols missed fire, Harry was
+immediately overpowered, and on the morrow was carried, sick and
+sorry, before the Justice.  From Dunstable he travelled his last
+journey to Newgate, and, being condemned at the Old Bailey, he
+was hanged till he was dead, and his body thereafter was carried
+for dissection to a surgeon's in that same Covent Garden where he
+first deserted his hackney cab for the pleasures of the town.
+
+`Gentleman Harry' was neither a brilliant thief nor a courteous
+highwayman.  There was no touch of the grand manner even in his
+prettiest achievement.  His predecessors had made a pistol and a
+vizard an overwhelming terror, and he did but profit by their
+tradition when he bade the cowed traveller stand and deliver. 
+His profession, as he practised it, neither demanded skill nor
+incurred danger.  Though he threatened death at every encounter,
+you never hear that he pulled a trigger throughout his career. 
+If his opponent jeered and rode off, he rode off with a
+whole skin and a full pocket.  Once even this renowned adventurer
+accepted the cut of a riding-whip across his face, nor made any
+attempt to avenge the insult.  But his manifold shortcomings were
+no hindrance to his success.  Wherever he went, between London
+and York, he stopped coaches and levied his tax.  A threatening
+voice, an arched eyebrow, an arrogant method of fingering an
+unloaded pistol, conspired with the craven, indolent habit of the
+time to make his every journey a procession of triumph.  He was
+capable of performing all such feats as the age required of him. 
+But you miss the spirit, the bravery, the urbanity, and the wit,
+which made the adventurer of the seventeenth century a figure of
+romance.
+
+One point only of the great tradition did Harry Simms remember. 
+He was never unwilling to restore a trinket made precious by
+sentiment.  Once when he took a gold ring from a gentleman's
+finger a gentlewoman burst into tears, exclaiming, `There goes
+your father's ring.'  Whereupon Simms threw all his booty into a
+hat, saying, `For God's sake, take that or anything else you
+please.'  In all other respects he was a bully, with the
+hesitancy of a coward, rather than the proper rival of Hind or
+Duval.  Apart from the exercise of his trade, he was a very
+Mohock for brutality.  He would ill-treat his victims, whenever
+their drunkenness permitted the freedom, and he had no better
+gifts for the women who were kind to him than cruelty and
+neglect.  One of his many imprisonments was the result of a
+monstrous ferocity.  `Unluckily in a quarrel,' he tells you
+gravely, `I ran a crab-stick into a woman's eye'; and well did he
+deserve his sojourn in the New Prison.  At another time he
+rewarded the keeper of a coffee-house, who supported him for six
+months, by stealing her watch; and, when she grumbled at his
+insolence, he reflected, with a chuckle, that she could more
+easily bear the loss of her watch than the loss of her lover. 
+Even in his gaiety there was an unpleasant spice of greed and
+truculence.  Once, when he was still seen in fashionable company,
+he went to a masquerade, dressed in a rich Spanish habit, lent
+him by a Captain in the Guards, and he made so fine a show that
+he captivated a young and beautiful Cyprian, whom, when she would
+have treated him with generosity, he did but reward with the loss
+of all her jewels.
+
+Moreover, he had so small a regard for his craft, that he would
+spoil his effects by drink or debauchery; and, though a
+highwayman, he cared so little for style, that he would as lief
+trick a drunken gamester as face his man on Bagshot Heath or
+beneath the shade of Epping Forest.  You admire not his success,
+because, like the success of the popular politician, it depended
+rather upon his dupes than upon his merit.  You approve not his
+raffish exploits in the hells of Covent Garden or Drury Lane. 
+But you cannot withhold respect from his consistent dandyism, and
+you are grateful for the record that, engaged in a mean
+enterprise, he was dressed `in a green velvet frock and a short
+lac'd waistcoat.'  Above all, his picturesque capture at
+Hockcliffe atones for much stupidity.  The resolution, wavering
+at the wine glass, the last drunken ride from St. Albans--these
+are inventions in experience, which should make Simms immortal. 
+And when he sits `by the fireside a good deal chagrined,' he
+recalls the arrest of a far greater man--even of Cartouche, who
+was surprised by the soldiers at his bedside stitching a torn
+pair of breeches.  His autobiography, wherein `he relates the
+truth as a dying man,' seemed excellent in the eyes of Borrow,
+who loved it so well that he imagined a sentence, ascribed it
+falsely to Simms, and then rewarded it with extravagant applause.
+
+But Gentleman Harry knew how to tell a simple story, and the
+book, `all wrote by myself while under sentence of death,' is his
+best performance.  In action he had many faults, for, if he was a
+highwayman among rakes, he was but a rake among highwaymen.
+
+
+
+A PARALLEL
+
+(THE SWITCHER AND GENTLEMAN
+HARRY)
+
+HAGGART and Simms are united in the praise of Borrow, and in the
+generous applause of posterity.  Each resumes for his own
+generation the prowess of his kind.  Each has assured his
+immortality by an experiment in literature; and if epic
+simplicity and rapid narrative are the virtues of biography, it
+is difficult to award the prize.  The Switcher preferred to write
+in the rough lingo, wherein he best expressed himself.  He packs
+his pages with ill-spelt slang, telling his story of thievery in
+the true language of thieves.  Gentleman Harry, as became a
+person of quality, mimicked the dialect wherewith he was familiar
+in the more fashionable gambling-dens of Covent Garden.  Both
+write with out the smallest suggestion of false shame or idle
+regret, and a natural vanity lifts each of them out of the pit of
+commonplace on to the tableland of the heroic.  They set forth
+their depredation, as a victorious general might record his
+triumphs, and they excel the nimblest Ordinary that ever penned a
+dying speech in all the gifts of the historian.
+
+But when you leave the study for the field, the Switcher
+instantly declares his superiority.  He had the happiness to
+practise his craft in its heyday, while Simms knew but the fag-
+end of a noble tradition.  Haggart, moreover, was an expert,
+pursuing a difficult art, while Simms was a bully, plundering his
+betters by bluff.  Simms boasted no quality which might be set
+off against the accurate delicacy of Haggart's hand.  The
+Englishman grew rich upon a rolling eye and a rusty pistol.  He
+put on his `fiercest manner,' and believed that the world would
+deny him nothing.  The Scot, rejoicing in his exquisite skill,
+went to work without fuss or bluster, and added the joy of
+artistic pride to his delight in plunder.  Though Simm's manner
+seems the more chivalrous, it required not one tithe of the
+courage which was Haggart's necessity.  On horseback, with the
+semblance of a fire-arm, a man may easily challenge a coachful of
+women.  It needs a cool brain and a sound courage to empty a
+pocket in the watchful presence of spies and policemen.  While
+Gentleman Harry chose a lonely road, or the cover of night for
+his exploits, the Switcher always worked by day, hustled by a
+crowd of witnesses.
+
+Their hours of leisure furnish a yet more striking contrast. 
+Simms was a polished dandy delighting in his clothes,
+unhappy if he were deprived of his bottle and his game.  Haggart,
+on the other hand, was before all things sealed to his
+profession.  He would have deserted the gayest masquerade, had he
+ever strayed into so light a frivolity, for the chance of
+lightening a pocket.  He tasted but few amusements without the
+limits of his craft, and he preserved unto the end a touch of
+that dour character which is the heritage of his race.  But,
+withal, he was an amiable decent body, who would have recoiled in
+horror from the drunken brutality of Gentleman Harry.  Though he
+bragged to George Combe of his pitiless undoing of wenches, he
+never thrust a crab-stick into a woman's eye, and he was
+incapable of rewarding a kindness by robbery and neglect.  Once--
+at Newcastle--he arrayed himself in a smart white coat and tops,
+but the splendour ill became his red-headed awkwardness, and he
+would have stood aghast at the satin frocks and velvet waistcoats
+of him who broke the hearts of Drury Lane.  But if he were
+gentler in his life, Haggart was prepared to fight with a more
+reckless courage when his trade demanded it.  It was the
+Gentleman's boast that he never shed the blood of man.  When
+David found a turnkey between himself and freedom, he did not
+hesitate to kill, though his remorse was bitter enough when he
+neared the gallows.  In brief, Haggart was not only the better
+craftsman, but the honester fellow, and though his hands were red
+with blood, he deserved his death far less than did the more
+truculent, less valiant Simms.  Each had in his brain the
+stuff whereof men of letters are made: this is their parallel. 
+And, by way of contrast, while the Switcher was an accomplished
+artist, Gentleman Harry was a roystering braggart.
+
+
+
+DEACON BRODIE AND
+CHARLES PEACE
+
+I
+DEACON BRODIE
+
+
+
+DEACON BRODIE
+
+AS William Brodie stood at the bar, on trial for a his life, he
+seemed the gallantest gentleman in court.  Thither he had been
+carried in a chair, and, still conscious of the honour paid him,
+he flashed a condescending smile upon his judges.  His step was
+jaunty as ever; his superb attire well became the Deacon of a
+Guild.  His coat was blue, his vest a very garden of flowers;
+while his satin breeches and his stockings of white silk were
+splendid in their simplicity.  Beneath a cocked hat his hair was
+fully dressed and powdered, and even the prosecuting counsel
+assailed him with the respect due to a man of fashion.  The
+fellow's magnificence was thrown into relief by the squalor of
+his accomplice.  For George Smith had neither the money nor the
+taste to disguise himself as a polished rogue, and he huddled as
+far from his master as he could in the rags of his mean estate. 
+Nor from this moment did Brodie ever abate one jot of his
+dignity.  He faced his accusers with a clear eye and a frigid
+amiability; he listened to his sentence with a calm
+contempt; he laughed complacently at the sorry interludes of
+judicial wit; and he faced the last music with a bravery and a
+cynicism which bore the stamp of true greatness.
+
+It was not until after his crime that Brodie's heroism approved
+itself.  And even then his was a triumph not of skill but of
+character.  Always a gentleman in manner and conduct, he owed the
+success and the failure of his life to this one quality.  When in
+flight he made for Flushing on board the Endeavour, the other
+passengers, who knew not his name, straightway christened him
+`the gentleman.'  The enterprise itself would have been
+impossible to one less persuasively gifted, and its proper
+execution is a tribute to the lofty quality of his mind.  There
+was he in London, a stranger and a fugitive; yet instead of
+crawling furtively into a coal-barge he charters a ship, captures
+the confidence of the captain, carries the other passengers to
+Flushing, when they were bound for Leith, and compels every one
+to confess his charm!  The thief, also, found him irresistible;
+and while the game lasted, the flash kens of Edinburgh murmured
+the Deacon's name in the hushed whisper of respect.
+
+His fine temperament disarmed treachery.  In London he visited an
+ancient doxy of his own, who, with her bully, shielded him from
+justice, though betrayal would have met with an ample reward. 
+Smith, if he knew himself the superior craftsman, trembled at the
+Deacon's nod, who thus swaggered it through life, with none
+to withhold the exacted reverence.  To this same personal
+compulsion he owed his worldly advancement.  Deacon of the
+Wrights' Guild while still a young man, he served upon the
+Council, was known for one of Edinburgh's honoured citizens, and
+never went abroad unmarked by the finger of respectful envy.  He
+was elected in 1773 a member of the Cape Club, and met at the
+Isle of Man Arms in Craig's Close the wittiest men of his time
+and town.  Raeburn, Runciman, and Ferguson the poet were of the
+society, and it was with such as these that Brodie might have
+wasted his vacant hour.  Indeed, at the very moment that he was
+cracking cribs and shaking the ivories, he was a chosen leader of
+fashion and gaiety; and it was the elegance of the `gentleman'
+that distinguished him from his fellows.
+
+The fop, indeed, had climbed the altitudes of life; the cracksman
+still stumbled in the valleys.  If he had a ready cunning in the
+planning of an enterprise, he must needs bungle at the execution;
+and had he not been associated with George Smith, a king of
+scoundrels, there would be few exploits to record.  And yet for
+the craft of housebreaker he had one solid advantage: he knew the
+locks and bolts of Edinburgh as he knew his primer--for had he
+not fashioned the most of them himself?  But, his knowledge once
+imparted to his accomplices, he cheerfully sank to a menial's
+office.  In no job did he play a principal's part: he was merely
+told off by Smith or another to guard the entrance and sound
+the alarm.  When M`Kain's on the Bridge was broken, the Deacon
+found the false keys; it was Smith who carried off such poor
+booty as was found.  And though the master suggested the attack
+upon Bruce's shop, knowing full well the simplicity of the lock,
+he lingered at the Vintner's over a game of hazard, and let the
+man pouch a sumptuous booty.
+
+Even the onslaught upon the Excise Office, which cost his life,
+was contrived with appalling clumsiness.  The Deacon of the
+Wrights' Guild, who could slash wood at his will, who knew the
+artifice of every lock in the city, let his men go to work with
+no better implements than the stolen coulter of a plough and a
+pair of spurs.  And when they tackled the ill omened job, Brodie
+was of those who brought failure upon it.  Long had they watched
+the door of the Excise; long had they studied the habits of its
+clerks; so that they went to work in no vain spirit of
+experiment.  Nor on the fatal night did they force an entrance
+until they had dogged the porter to his home.  Smith and Brown
+ransacked the place for money, while Brodie and Andrew Ainslie
+remained without to give a necessary warning.  Whereupon Ainslie
+was seized with fright, and Brodie, losing his head, called off
+the others, so that six hundred pounds were left, that might have
+been an easy prey.  Smith, indignant at the collapse of the long-
+pondered design, laid the blame upon his master, and they
+swung, as Brodie's grim spirit of farce suggested, for four
+pounds apiece.
+
+The humours of the situation were all the Deacon's own.  He
+dressed the part in black; his respectability grinned behind a
+vizard; and all the while he trifled nonchalantly with a pistol. 
+Breaking the silence with snatches from The Beggar's Opera, he
+promised that all their lead should turn to gold, christened the
+coulter and the crow the Great and Little Samuel, and then went
+off to drink and dice at the Vintner's.  How could anger prevail
+against this undying gaiety?  And if Smith were peevish at
+failure, he was presently reconciled, and prepared once more to
+die for his Deacon.
+
+Even after escape, the amateur is still apparent.  True, he
+managed the trip to Flushing with his ancient extravagance; true,
+he employed all the juggleries of the law to prevent his
+surrender at Amsterdam.  But he knew not the caution of the born
+criminal, and he was run to earth, because he would still write
+to his friends like a gentleman.  His letters, during this
+nightmare of disaster, are perfect in their carelessness and
+good-fellowship.  In this he demands news of his children, as
+becomes a father and a citizen, and furnishes a schedule of their
+education; in that he is curious concerning the issue of a main,
+and would know whether his black cock came off triumphant.  Nor,
+even in flight, did he forget his proper craft, but would have
+his tools sent to Charleston, that in America he might
+resume the trade that had made him Deacon.
+
+But his was the art of conduct, not of guile, and he deserved
+capture for his rare indifference.  Why, then, with no natural
+impulsion, did he risk the gallows?  Why, being no born thief,
+and innocent of the thief's cunning, did he associate with so
+clever a scoundrel as George Smith, with cowards craven as Brown
+and Ainslie?  The greed of gold, doubtless, half persuaded him,
+but gold was otherwise attainable, and the motive was assuredly
+far more subtle.  Brodie, in fact, was of a romantic turn.  He
+was, so to say, a glorified schoolboy, surfeited with penny
+dreadfuls.  He loved above all things to patter the flash, to
+dream himself another Macheath, to trick himself out with all the
+trappings of a crime he was unfit to commit.  It was never the
+job itself that attracted him: he would always rather throw the
+dice than force a neighbour's window.  But he must needs have a
+distraction from the respectability of his life.  Everybody was
+at his feet; he was Deacon of his Guild, at an age whereat his
+fellows were striving to earn a reputable living; his
+masterpieces were fashioned, and the wrights' trade was already a
+burden.  To go upon the cross seemed a dream of freedom, until he
+snapped his fingers at the world, filled his mouth with slang,
+prepared his alibi, and furnished him a whole wardrobe of
+disguises.
+
+With a conscious irony, maybe, he buried his pistols beneath
+the domestic hearth, jammed his dark lantern into the press,
+where he kept his game-cocks, and determined to make an
+inextricable jumble of his career.  Drink is sometimes a
+sufficient reaction against the orderliness of a successful life.
+
+But drink and cards failed with the Deacon, and at the Vintner's
+of his frequentation he encountered accomplices proper for his
+schemes.  Never was so outrageous a protest offered against
+domesticity.  Yet Brodie's resolution was romantic after its
+fashion, and was far more respectable than the blackguardism of
+the French Revolution, which distracted housewifely discontent a
+year after the Deacon swung.  Moreover, it gave occasion for his
+dandyism and his love of display.  If in one incarnation he was
+the complete gentleman, in another he dressed the part of the
+perfect scoundrel, and the list of his costumes would have filled
+one of his own ledgers.
+
+But, when once the possibility of housebreaking was taken from
+him, he returned to his familiar dignity.  Being questioned by
+the Procurator Fiscal, he shrugged his shoulders, regretting that
+other affairs demanded his attention.  As who should say: it is
+unpardonable to disturb the meditations of a gentleman.  He made
+a will bequeathing his knowledge of law to the magistrates of
+Edinburgh, his dexterity in cards and dice to Hamilton the
+chimney-sweeper, and all his bad qualities to his good friends
+and old companions, Brown and Ainslie, not doubting, however,
+that their own will secure them `a rope at last.'  In prison
+it was his worst complaint that, though the nails of his toes and
+fingers were not quite so long as Nebuchadnezzar's, they were
+long enough for a mandarin, and much longer than he found
+convenient.  Thus he preserved an untroubled demeanour until the
+day of his death.  Always polite, and even joyous, he met the
+smallest indulgence with enthusiasm.  When Smith complained that
+a respite of six weeks was of small account, Brodie exclaimed,
+`George, what would you and I give for six weeks longer?  Six
+weeks would be an age to us.'
+
+The day of execution was the day of his supreme triumph.  As some
+men are artists in their lives, so the Deacon was an artist in
+his death.  Nothing became him so well as his manner of leaving
+the world.  There is never a blot upon this exquisite
+performance.  It is superb, impeccable!  Again his dandyism
+supported him, and he played the part of a dying man in a full
+suit of black, his hair, as always, dressed and powdered.  The
+day before he had been jovial and sparkling.  He had chanted all
+his flash songs, and cracked the jokes of a man of fashion.  But
+he set out for the gallows with a firm step and a rigorous
+demeanour.  He offered a prayer of his own composing, and `O
+Lord,' he said, `I lament that I know so little of Thee.'  The
+patronage and the confession are alike characteristic.  As he
+drew near the scaffold, the model of which he had given to his
+native city a few years since, he stepped with an agile
+briskness; he examined the halter, destined for his neck, with an
+impartial curiosity.
+
+His last pleasantry was uttered as he ascended the table. 
+`George,' he muttered, `you are first in hand,' and thereafter he
+took farewell of his friends.  Only one word of petulance escaped
+his lips: when the halters were found too short, his contempt for
+slovenly workmanship urged him to protest, and to demand a
+punishment for the executioner.  Again ascending the table, he
+assured himself against further mishap by arranging the rope with
+his own hands.  Thus he was turned off in a brilliant assembly. 
+The Provost and Magistrates, in respect for his dandyism, were
+resplendent in their robes of office, and though the crowd of
+spectators rivalled that which paid a tardy honour to Jonathan
+Wild, no one was hurt save the customary policeman.  Such was the
+dignified end of a `double life.'  And the duplicity is the
+stranger, because the real Deacon was not Brodie the Cracksman,
+but Brodie the Gentleman.  So lightly did he esteem life that he
+tossed it from him in a careless impulse.  So little did he fear
+death that, `What is hanging?' he asked.  `A leap in the dark.'
+
+
+
+II
+CHARLES PEACE
+
+
+CHARLES PEACE
+
+CHARLES PEACE, after the habit of his kind, was born of
+scrupulously honest parents.  The son of a religious file-maker,
+he owed to his father not only his singular piety but his love of
+edged tools.  As he never encountered an iron bar whose scission
+baffled him, so there never was a fire-eating Methodist to whose
+ministrations he would not turn a repentant ear.  After a handy
+portico and a rich booty he loved nothing so well as a soul-
+stirring discourse.  Not even his precious fiddle occupied a
+larger space in his heart than that devotion which the ignorant
+have termed hypocrisy.  Wherefore his career was no less suitable
+to his ambition than his inglorious end.  For he lived the king
+of housebreakers, and he died a warning to all evildoers, with a
+prayer of intercession trembling upon his lips.
+
+The hero's boyhood is wrapped in obscurity.  It is certain that
+no glittering precocity brought disappointment to his maturer
+years, and he was already nineteen when he achieved his first
+imprisonment.  Even then 'twas a sorry offence, which merited no
+more than a month, so that he returned to freedom and his
+fiddle with his character unbesmirched.  Serious as ever in pious
+exercises, he gained a scanty living as strolling musician. 
+There was never a tavern in Sheffield where the twang of his
+violin was unheard, and the skill wherewith he extorted music
+from a single string earned him the style and title of the modern
+Paganini.  But such an employ was too mean for his pride, and he
+soon got to work again--this time with a better success.  The
+mansions of Sheffield were his early prey, and a rich plunder
+rewarded his intrepidity.  The design was as masterly as its
+accomplishment.  The grand style is already discernible.  The
+houses were broken in quietude and good order.  None saw the
+opened window; none heard the step upon the stair; in truth, the
+victim's loss was his first intelligence.
+
+But when the booty was in the robber's own safe keeping, the
+empiricism of his method was revealed.  As yet he knew no secret
+and efficient fence to shield him from detection; as yet he had
+not learnt that the complete burglar works alone.  This time he
+knew two accomplices--women both, and one his own sister!  A
+paltry pair of boots was the clue of discovery, and a goodly
+stretch was the proper reward of a clumsy indiscretion.  So for
+twenty years he wavered between the crowbar and the prison house,
+now perfecting a brilliant scheme, now captured through
+recklessness or drink.  Once when a mistake at Manchester sent
+him to the Hulks, he owned his failure was the fruit of
+brandy, and after his wont delivered (from the dock) a little
+homily upon the benefit of sobriety.
+
+Meanwhile his art was growing to perfection.  He had at last
+discovered that a burglary demands as diligent a forethought as a
+campaign; he had learnt that no great work is achieved by a
+multitude of minds.  Before his boat carried off a goodly parcel
+of silk from Nottingham, he was known to the neighbourhood as an
+enthusiastic and skilful angler.  One day he dangled his line,
+the next he sat peacefully at the same employ; and none suspected
+that the mild mannered fisherman had under the cloud of night
+despatched a costly parcel to London.  Even the years of
+imprisonment were not ill-spent.  Peace was still preparing the
+great achievement of his life, and he framed from solitary
+reflection as well as from his colleagues in crime many an
+ingenious theory afterwards fearlessly translated into practice. 
+And when at last he escaped the slavery of the gaol, picture-
+framing was the pursuit which covered the sterner business of his
+life.  His depredation involved him in no suspicion; his changing
+features rendered recognition impossible.  When the exercise of
+his trade compelled him to shoot a policeman at Whalley Range,
+another was sentenced for the crime; and had he not encountered
+Mrs. Dyson, who knows but he might have practised his art in
+prosperous obscurity until claimed by a coward's death?  But a
+stormy love-passage with Mrs. Dyson led to the unworthy
+killing of the woman's husband--a crime unnecessary and in no
+sense consonant to the burglar's craft; and Charles Peace was an
+outlaw, with a reward set upon his head.
+
+And now came a period of true splendour.  Like Fielding, like
+Cervantes, like Sterne, Peace reserved his veritable masterpiece
+for the certainty of middlelife.  His last two years were nothing
+less than a march of triumph.  If you remember his constant
+danger, you will realise the grandeur of the scheme.  From the
+moment that Peace left Bannercross with Dyson's blood upon his
+hands, he was a hunted man.  His capture was worth five hundred
+pounds; his features were familiar to a hundred hungry
+detectives.  Had he been less than a man of genius, he might have
+taken an unavailing refuge in flight or concealment.  But,
+content with no safety unattended by affluence, he devised a
+surer plan: he became a householder.  Now, a semi-detached villa
+is an impregnable stronghold.  Respectability oozes from the
+dusky mortar of its bricks, and escapes in clouds of smoke from
+its soot-grimed chimneys.  No policeman ever detects a desperate
+ruffian in a demure black-coated gentleman who day after day
+turns an iron gate upon its rusty hinge.  And thus, wrapt in a
+cloak of suburban piety, Peace waged a pitiless and effective war
+upon his neighbours.
+
+He pillaged Blackheath, Greenwich, Peckham, and many another home
+of honest worth, with a noiselessness and a precision that were
+the envy of the whole family.  The unknown and intrepid
+burglar was a terror to all the clerkdom of the City, and though
+he was as secret and secluded as Peace, the two heroes were never
+identified.  At the time of his true eminence he `resided' in
+Evelina Road, Peckham, and none was more sensible than he how
+well the address became his provincial refinement.  There he
+installed himself with his wife and Mrs. Thompson.  His drawing-
+room suite was the envy of the neighbourhood; his pony-trap
+proclaimed him a man of substance; his gentle manners won the
+respect of all Peckham.  Hither he would invite his friends to
+such entertainments as the suburb expected.  His musical evenings
+were recorded in the local paper, while on Sundays he chanted the
+songs of Zion with a zeal which Clapham herself might envy.
+
+The house in Evelina Road was no mere haunt of quiet gentility. 
+It was chosen with admirable forethought and with a stern eye
+upon the necessities of business.  Beyond the garden wall frowned
+a railway embankment, which enabled the cracksman to escape from
+his house without opening the front door.  By the same embankment
+he might, if he chose, convey the trophies of the night's work;
+and what mattered it if the windows rattled to the passing train?
+
+At least a cloud of suspicion was dispelled.  Here he lived for
+two years, with naught to disturb his tranquillity save Mrs.
+Thompson's taste for drink.  The hours of darkness were spent in
+laborious activity, the open day brought its own
+distractions.  There was always Bow Street wherein to loaf, and
+the study of the criminal law lost none of its excitement from
+the reward offered outside for the bald-headed fanatic who sat
+placidly within.  And the love of music was Peace's constant
+solace.  Whatever treasures he might discard in a hurried flight,
+he never left a fiddle behind, and so vast became his pilfered
+collection that he had to borrow an empty room in a friend's
+house for its better disposal.
+
+Moreover, he had a fervent pride in his craft; and you might
+deduce from his performance the whole theory and practice of
+burglary.  He worked ever without accomplices.  He knew neither
+the professional thief nor his lingo; and no association with
+gaol-birds involved him in the risk of treachery and betrayal. 
+His single colleague was a friendly fence, and not even at the
+gallows' foot would he surrender the fence's name.  His master
+quality was a constructive imagination.  Accident never marred
+his design.  He would visit the house of his breaking until he
+understood its ground-plan, and was familiar with its
+inhabitants.  This demanded an amazing circumspection, but Peace
+was as stealthy as a cat, and he would keep silent vigil for
+hours rather than fail from an over keen anxiety.  Having marked
+the place of his entry, and having chosen an appropriate hour, he
+would prevent the egress of his enemies by screwing up the doors.
+
+He then secured the room wherein he worked, and the job finished,
+he slung himself into the night by the window, so that, ere
+an alarm could be raised, his pony-trap had carried the booty to
+Evelina Road.
+
+Such was the outline of his plan; but, being no pedant, he varied
+it at will: nor was he likely to court defeat through lack of
+resource.  Accomplished as he was in his proper business, he was
+equally alert to meet the accompanying risks.  He had brought the
+art of cozening strange dogs to perfection; and for the exigence
+of escape, his physical equipment was complete.  He would resist
+capture with unparalleled determination, and though he shuddered
+at the shedding of blood, he never hesitated when necessity bade
+him pull the trigger.  Moreover, there was no space into which he
+would not squeeze his body, and the iron bars were not yet
+devised through which he could not make an exit.  Once--it was at
+Nottingham--he was surprised by an inquisitive detective who
+demanded his name and trade.  `I am a hawker of spectacles,'
+replied Peace, `and my licence is downstairs.  Wait two minutes
+and I'll show it you.'  The detective never saw him again.  Six
+inches only separated the bars of the window, but Peace asked no
+more, and thus silently he won his freedom.  True, his most
+daring feat--the leap from the train--resulted not in liberty,
+but in a broken head.  But he essayed a task too high even for
+his endeavour, and, despite his manacles, at least he left his
+boot in the astonished warder's grip.
+
+No less remarkable than his skill and daring were his means
+of evasion.  Even without a formal disguise he could elude
+pursuit.  At an instant's warning, his loose, plastic features
+would assume another shape; out shot his lower jaw, and, as if by
+magic, the blood flew into his face until you might take him for
+a mulatto.  Or, if he chose, he would strap his arm to his side,
+and let the police be baffled by a wooden mechanism, decently
+finished with a hook.  Thus he roamed London up and down
+unsuspected, and even after his last failure at Blackheath, none
+would have discovered Charles Peace in John Ward, the Single-
+Handed Burglar, had not woman's treachery prompted detection. 
+Indeed, he was an epitome of his craft, the Complete Burglar made
+manifest.
+
+Not only did he plan his victories with previous ingenuity, but
+he sacrificed to his success both taste and sentiment.  His dress
+was always of the most sombre; his only wear was the decent black
+of everyday godliness.  The least spice of dandyism might have
+distinguished him from his fellows, and Peace's whole vanity lay
+in his craft.  Nor did the paltry sentiment of friendship deter
+him from his just course.  When the panic aroused by the silent
+burglar was uncontrolled, a neighbour consulted Peace concerning
+the safety of his house.  The robber, having duly noted the
+villa's imperfections, and having discovered the hiding-place of
+jewellery and plate, complacently rifled it the next night. 
+Though his self-esteem sustained a shock, though henceforth
+his friend thought meanly of his judgment, he was rewarded with
+the solid pudding of plunder, and the world whispered of the
+mysterious marauder with a yet colder horror.  In truth, the
+large simplicity and solitude of his style sets him among the
+Classics, and though others have surpassed him at single points
+of the game, he practised the art with such universal breadth and
+courage as were then a revolution, and are still unsurpassed.
+
+But the burglar ever fights an unequal battle.  One false step,
+and defeat o'erwhelms him.  For two years had John Ward
+intimidated the middle-class seclusion of South London; for two
+years had he hidden from a curious world the ugly, furrowed
+visage of Charles Peace.  The bald head, the broad-rimmed
+spectacles, the squat, thick figure--he stood but five feet four
+in his stockings, and adds yet another to the list of little-
+great men--should have ensured detection, but the quick change
+and the persuasive gesture were omnipotent, and until the autumn
+of 1878 Peace was comfortably at large.  And then an encounter at
+Blackheath put him within the clutch of justice.  His revolver
+failed in its duty, and, valiant as he was, at last he met his
+match.  In prison he was alternately insolent and aggrieved.  He
+blustered for justice, proclaimed himself the victim of sudden
+temptation, and insisted that his intention had been ever
+innocent.
+
+But, none the less, he was sentenced to a lifer, and, the mask of
+John Ward being torn from him, he was sent to Sheffield to stand
+his trial as Charles Peace.  The leap from the train is
+already recorded; and at his last appearance in the dock he
+rolled upon the floor, a petulant and broken man.  When once the
+last doom was pronounced, he forgot both fiddle and crowbar; he
+surrendered himself to those exercises of piety from which he had
+never wavered.  The foolish have denounced him for a hypocrite,
+not knowing that the artist may have a life apart from his art,
+and that to Peace religion was an essential pursuit.  So he died,
+having released from an unjust sentence the poor wretch who at
+Whalley Range had suffered for his crime, and offering up a
+consolatory prayer for all mankind.  In truth, there was no enemy
+for whom he did not intercede.  He prayed for his gaolers, for
+his executioner, for the Ordinary, for his wife, for Mrs.
+Thompson, his drunken doxy, and he went to his death with the
+sure step of one who, having done his duty, is reconciled with
+the world.  The mob testified its affectionate admiration by
+dubbing him `Charley,' and remembered with effusion his last grim
+pleasantry.  `What is the scaffold?' he asked with sublime
+earnestness.  And the answer came quick and sanctimonious:  `A
+short cut to Heaven!'
+
+
+
+III
+A PARALLEL
+
+(DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES
+PEACE)
+
+
+
+A PARALLEL
+(DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES
+PEACE)
+
+NOT a parallel, but a contrast, since at all points Peace is
+Brodie's antithesis.  The one is the austerest of Classics,
+caring only for the ultimate perfection of his work.  The other
+is the gayest of Romantics, happiest when by the way he produces
+a glittering effect, or dazzles the ear by a vain impertinence. 
+Now, it is by thievery that Peace reached magnificence.  A
+natural aptitude drove him from the fiddle to the centre-bit.  He
+did but rob, because genius followed the impulse.  He had studied
+the remotest details of his business; he was sternly professional
+in the conduct of his life, and, as became an old gaol-bird,
+there was no antic of the policeman wherewith he was not
+familiar.  Moreover, not only had he reduced house-breaking to a
+science, but, being ostensibly nothing better than a picture-
+frame maker, he had invented an incomparable set of tools
+wherewith to enter and evade his neighbour's house.  Brodie, on
+the other hand, was a thief for distraction.  His method was
+as slovenly as ignorance could make it.  Though by trade a
+wright, and therefore a master of all the arts of joinery, he was
+so deficient in seriousness that he stole a coulter wherewith to
+batter the walls of the Excise Office.  While Peace fought the
+battle in solitude, Brodie was not only attended by a gang, but
+listened to the command of his subordinates, and was never
+permitted to perform a more intricate duty than the sounding of
+the alarm.  And yet here is the ironical contrast.  Peace, the
+professional thief, despised his brothers, and was never heard to
+patter a word of flash.  Brodie, the amateur, courted the society
+of all cross coves, and would rather express himself in Pedlar's
+French than in his choicest Scots.  While the Englishman scraped
+Tate and Brady from a one-stringed fiddle, the Scot limped a
+chaunt from The Beggar's Opera, and thought himself a devil of
+a fellow.  The one was a man about town masquerading as a thief;
+the other the most serious among housebreakers, singing psalms in
+all good faith.
+
+But if Peace was incomparably the better craftsman, Brodie was
+the prettier gentleman.  Peace would not have permitted Brodie to
+drive his pony-trap the length of Evelina Road.  But Brodie, in
+revenge, would have cut Peace had he met him in the Corn-market. 
+The one was a sombre savage, the other a jovial comrade, and it
+was a witty freak of fortune that impelled both to follow the
+same trade.  And thus you arrive at another point of
+difference.  The Englishman had no intelligence of life's
+amenity.  He knew naught of costume: clothes were the limit of
+his ambition.  Dressed always for work, he was like the
+caterpillar which assumes the green of the leaf, wherein it
+hides: he wore only such duds as should attract the smallest
+notice, and separate him as far as might be from his business. 
+But the Scot was as fine a dandy as ever took (haphazard) to the
+cracking of kens.  If his refinement permitted no excess of
+splendour, he went ever gloriously and appropriately apparelled. 
+He was well-mannered, cultured, with scarce a touch of
+provincialism to mar his gay demeanour: whereas Peace knew little
+enough outside the practice of burglary, and the proper handling
+of the revolver.
+
+Our Charles, for example, could neither spell nor write; he
+dissembled his low origin with the utmost difficulty, and at the
+best was plastered over (when not at work) with the parochialism
+of the suburbs.  So far the contrast is complete; and even in
+their similarities there is an evident difference.  Each led a
+double life; but while Brodie was most himself among his own
+kind, the real Peace was to be found not fiddle-scraping in
+Evelina Road but marking down policemen in the dusky byways of
+Blackheath.  Brodie's grandeur was natural to him; Peace's
+respectability, so far as it transcended the man's origin, was a
+cloak of villainy.
+
+Each, again, was an inventor, and while the more innocent
+Brodie designed a gallows, the more hardened Peace would have
+gained notoriety by the raising of wrecks and the patronage of
+Mr. Plimsoll.  And since both preserved a certain courage to the
+end, since both died on the scaffold as becomes a man, the
+contrast is once more characteristic.  Brodie's cynicism is a
+fine foil to the piety of Peace; and while each end was natural
+after its own fashion, there is none who will deny to the Scot
+the finer sense of fitness.  Nor did any step in their career
+explain more clearly the difference in their temperament than
+their definitions of the gallows.  For Peace it is `a short cut
+to Heaven'; for Brodie it is `a leap in the dark.'  Again the
+Scot has the advantage.  Again you reflect that, if Peace is the
+most accomplished Classic among the housebreakers, the Deacon is
+the merriest companion who ever climbed the gallows by the
+shoulders of the incomparable Macheath.
+
+
+
+THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT
+
+
+THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT
+
+THE Abb<e'> Bruneau, who gave his shaven head in atonement for
+unnumbered crimes, was a finished exponent of duplicity.  In the
+eye of day and of Entrammes he shone a miracle of well-doing; by
+night he prowled in the secret places of Laval.  The world
+watched him, habited in the decent black of his calling; no
+sooner was he beyond sight of his parish than his valise was
+opened, and he arrayed himself--under the hedge, no doubt--in a
+suit of jaunty grey.  The pleasures for which he sacrificed the
+lives of others and his own were squalid enough, but they were
+the best a provincial brain might imagine; and he sinned the sins
+of a hedge priest with a courage and effrontery which his
+brethren may well envy.  Indeed, the Man in the Grey Suit will be
+sent down the ages with a grimmer scandal, if with a staler
+mystery, than the Man in the Iron Mask.
+
+He was born of parents who were certainly poor, and possibly
+honest, at Ass<e'>-le-Berenger.  He counted a dozen Chouans among
+his ancestry, and brigandage swam in his blood.  Even his
+childhood was crimson with crimes, which the quick memory of
+the countryside long ago lost in the pride of having bred a
+priest.  He stained his first cure of souls with the poor, sad
+sin of arson, which the bishop, fearful of scandal and loth to
+check a promising career, condoned with a suitable advancement. 
+At Entrammes, his next benefice, he entered into his full
+inheritance of villainy, and here it was--despite his own
+protest--that he devised the grey suit which brought him ruin and
+immortality.  To the wild, hilarious dissipation of Laval, the
+nearest town, he fell an immediate and unresisting prey.  Think
+of the glittering lamps, the sparkling taverns, the bright-eyed
+women, the manifold fascinations, which are the character and
+delight of this forgotten city!  Why, if the Abb<e'> Bruneau
+doled out comfort and absolution at Entrammes--why should he not
+enjoy at Laval the wilder joys of the flesh?  Lack of money was
+the only hindrance, since our priest was not of those who could
+pursue bonnes fortunes; ever he sighed for `booze and the
+blowens,' but `booze and the blowens' he could only purchase with
+the sovereigns his honest calling denied him.  There was no
+resource but thievery and embezzlement, sins which led sometimes
+to falsehood or incendiarism, and at a pinch to the graver
+enterprise of murder.  But Bruneau was not one to boggle at
+trifles.  Women he would encounter--young or old, dark or fair,
+ugly or beautiful, it was all one to him--and the fools who
+withheld him riches must be punished for their niggard hand. 
+For a while a theft here and there, a cunning extortion of money
+upon the promise of good works, sufficed for his necessities, but
+still he hungered for a coup, and patiently he devised and
+watched his opportunity.
+
+Meanwhile his cunning protected him, and even if the gaze of
+suspicion fell upon him he contrived his orgies with so neat a
+discretion that the Church, which is not wont to expose her
+malefactors, preserved a timid and an innocent silence.  The
+Abb<e'> disappeared with a commendable constancy, and with that
+just sense of secrecy which should compel even an archiepiscopal
+admiration.  He was not of those who would drag his cloth through
+the mire.  Not until the darkness he loved so fervently covered
+the earth would he escape from the dull respectability of
+Entrammes, nor did he ever thus escape unaccompanied by his
+famous valise.  The grey suit was an effectual disguise to his
+calling, and so jealous was he of the Church's honour that he
+never--unless in his cups--disclosed his tonsure.  One of his
+innumerable loves confessed in the witness-box that Bruneau
+always retained his hat in the glare of the Caf<e'>, protesting
+that a headache rendered him fatally susceptible to draught; and
+such was his thoughtful punctilio that even in the comparative
+solitude of a guilty bed-chamber he covered his shorn locks with
+a nightcap.
+
+And while his conduct at Laval was unimpeachable, he always
+proved a nice susceptibility in his return.  A cab carried
+him within a discreet distance of his home, whence, having
+exchanged the grey for the more sober black, he would tramp on
+foot, and thus creep in tranquil and unobserved.  But simple as
+it is to enjoy, enjoyment must still be purchased, and the
+Abb<e'> was never guilty of a meanness.  The less guilty scheme
+was speedily staled, and then it was that the Abb<e'> bethought
+him of murder.
+
+His first victim was the widow Bourdais, who pursued the honest
+calling of a florist at Laval.  Already the curate was on those
+terms of intimacy which unite the robber with the robbed; for
+some months earlier he had imposed a forced loan of sixty francs
+upon his victim.  But on the 15th of July 1893, he left
+Entrammes, resolved upon a serious measure.  The black valise was
+in his hand, as he set forth upon the arid, windy road.  Before
+he reached Laval he had made the accustomed transformation, and
+it was no priest, but a layman, doucely dressed in grey, that
+awaited Mme. Bourdais' return from the flower-market.  He entered
+the shop with the coolness of a friend, and retreated to the door
+of the parlour when two girls came to make a purchase.  No sooner
+had the widow joined him than he cut her throat, and, with the
+ferocity of the beast who loves blood as well as plunder,
+inflicted some forty wounds upon her withered frame.  His escape
+was simple and dignified; he called the cabman, who knew him
+well, and who knew, moreover, what was required of him; and the
+priest was snugly in bed, though perhaps exhausted with
+blood and pleasure, when the news of the murder followed him to
+his village.
+
+Next day the crime was common gossip, and the Abb<e'>'s friends
+took counsel with him.  One there was astonished that the culprit
+remained undiscovered.  `But why should you marvel?' said
+Bruneau.  `I could kill you and your wife at your own chimney-
+corner without a soul knowing.  Had I taken to evil courses
+instead of to good I should have been a terrible assassin.' 
+There is a touch of the pride which De Quincey attributes to
+Williams in this boastfulness, and throughout the parallel is
+irresistible.  Williams, however, was the better dandy; he put on
+a dress-coat and patent-leather pumps because the dignity of his
+work demanded a fitting costume.  And Bruneau wore the grey suit
+not without a hope of disguise.  Yet you like to think that the
+Abb<e'> looked complacently upon his valise, and had forethought
+for the cut of his professional coat; and if he be not in the
+first flight of artistry, remember his provincial upbringing, and
+furnish the proper excuse.
+
+Meanwhile the scandal of the murdered widow passed into
+forgetfulness, and the Abb<e'> was still impoverished.  Already
+he had robbed his vicar, and the suspicion of the Abb<e'> Fricot
+led on to the final and the detected crime.  Now Fricot had noted
+the loss of money and of bonds, and though he refrained from
+exposure he had confessed to a knowledge of the criminal. 
+M. Bruneau was naturally sensitive to suspicion, and he
+determined upon the immediate removal of this danger to his
+peace.  On January 2, 1894, M. Fricot returned to supper after
+administering the extreme unction to a parishioner.  While the
+meal was preparing, he went into his garden in sabots and
+bareheaded, and never again was seen alive.  The supper cooled,
+the vicar was still absent; the murderer, hungry with his toil,
+ate not only his own, but his victim's share of the food, grimly
+hinting that Fricot would not come back.  Suicide was dreamed of,
+murder hinted; up and down the village was the search made, and
+none was more zealous than the distressed curate.
+
+At last a peasant discovered some blocks of wood in the well, and
+before long blood-stains revealed themselves on the masonry. 
+Speedily was the body recovered, disfigured and battered beyond
+recognition, and the voice of the village went up in denunciation
+of the Abb<e'> Bruneau.  Immunity had made the culprit callous,
+and in a few hours suspicion became certainty.  A bleeding nose
+was the lame explanation given for the stains which were on his
+clothes, on the table, on the keys of his harmonium.  A quaint
+and characteristic folly was it that drove the murderer straight
+to the solace of his religion.  You picture him, hot and red-
+handed from murder, soothing his battered conscience with some
+devilish Requiem for the unshrived soul he had just parted from
+its broken body, and leaving upon the harmonium the
+ineradicable traces of his guilt.  Thus he lived, poised between
+murder and the Church, spending upon the vulgar dissipation of a
+Breton village the blood and money of his foolish victims.  But
+for him `les tavernes et les filles' of Laval meant a veritable
+paradise, and his sojourn in the country is proof enough of a
+limited cunning.  Had he been more richly endowed, Paris had been
+the theatre of his crimes.  As it is, he goes down to posterity
+as the Man in the Grey Suit, and the best friend the cabmen of
+Laval ever knew.  Them, indeed, he left inconsolable.
+
+
+
+MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>
+
+
+
+MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>
+
+The childhood of the Abb<e'> Rosselot is as secret as his origin,
+and no man may know whether Belfort or Bavaria smiled upon his
+innocence.  A like mystery enshrouds his early manhood, and the
+malice of his foes, who are legion, denounces him for a Jesuit of
+Innsbruck.  But since he has lived within the eye of the world
+his villainies have been revealed as clearly as his attainments,
+and history provides him no other rival in the corruption of
+youth than the infamous Thwackum.
+
+It is not every scholar's ambition to teach the elements, and
+Rosselot adopted his modest calling as a cloak of crime.  No
+sooner was he installed in a mansion than he became the mansion's
+master, and henceforth he ruled his employer's domain with the
+tyrannical severity of a Grand Inquisitor.  His soul wrapped in
+the triple brass of arrogance, he even dared to lay his hands
+upon food before his betters were served; and presently,
+emboldened by success, he would order the dinners, reproach the
+cook with a too lavish use of condiments, and descend with
+insolent expostulation into the kitchen.  In a week he had
+opened the cupboards upon a dozen skeletons, and made them rattle
+their rickety bones up and down the draughty staircases, until
+the inmates shivered with horror and the terrified neighbours
+fled the haunted castle as a lazar-house.  Once in possession of
+a family secret, he felt himself secure, and henceforth he was
+free to browbeat his employer and to flog his pupil to the
+satisfaction of his waspish nature.  Moreover, he was endowed
+with all the insight and effrontery of a trained journalist.  So
+sedulous was he in his search after the truth, that neither man
+nor woman could deny him confidence.  And, as vinegar flowed in
+his veins for blood, it was his merry sport to set wife against
+husband and children against father.  Not even were the servants
+safe from his watchful inquiry, and housemaids and governesses
+alike entrusted their hopes and fears to his malicious keeping. 
+And when the house had retired to rest, with what a sinister
+delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty
+knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! 
+To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this
+wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's
+scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian
+resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his
+vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this smiling,
+demoniacal tutor.
+
+But a too villainous curiosity was not the Abb<e'>'s capital sin.
+
+Not only did he entertain his leisure with wrecking the
+happiness of a united family, but he was an enemy open and
+declared of France.  It was his amiable pastime at the dinner-
+table, when he had first helped himself to such delicacies as
+tempted his dainty palate, to pronounce a pompous eulogy upon the
+German Emperor.  France, he would say with an exultant smile, is
+a pays pourri, which exists merely to be the football of
+Prussia.  She has but one hope of salvation--still the monster
+speaks--and that is to fall into the benign occupation of a
+vigorous race.  Once upon a time--the infamy is scarce credible--
+he was conducting his young charges past a town-hall, over the
+lintel of whose door glittered those proud initials `R. F.' 
+`What do they stand for?' asked this demon Barlow.  And when the
+patriotic Tommy hesitated for an answer, the preceptor exclaimed
+with ineffable contempt, `Race de fous'!  It is no wonder, then,
+that this foe of his fatherland feared to receive a letter openly
+addressed; rather he would slink out under cover of night and
+seek his correspondence at the poste restante, like a guilty
+lover or a British tourist.
+
+The Ch<a^>teau de Presles was built for his reception.  It was
+haunted by a secret, which none dare murmur in the remotest
+garret.  There was no more than a whisper of murder in the air,
+but the Marquis shuddered when his wife's eye frowned upon him. 
+True, the miserable Menaldo had disappeared from his seminary ten
+years since, but threats of disclosure were uttered continually,
+and respectability might only be purchased by a profound
+silence.  Here was the Abb<e'>'s most splendid opportunity, and
+he seized it with all the eagerness of a greedy temperament.  The
+Marquise, a wealthy peasant, who was rather at home on the wild
+hill-side than in her stately castle, became an instant prey to
+his devilish intrigue.  The governess, an antic old maid of
+fifty-seven, whose conversation was designed to bring a blush to
+the cheek of the most hardened dragoon, was immediately on terms
+of so frank an intimacy that she flung bread pellets at him
+across the table, and joyously proposed, if we may believe the
+priest on his oath, to set up housekeeping with him, that they
+might save expense.  Two high-spirited boys were always at hand
+to encourage his taste for flogging, and had it not been for the
+Marquis, the Abb<e'>'s cup would have been full to overflowing. 
+But the Marquis loved not the lean, ogling instructor of his
+sons, and presently began to assail him with all the abuse of
+which he was master.  He charged the Abb<e'> with unspeakable
+villainy; salop and saligaud were the terms in which he would
+habitually refer to him.  He knew the rascal for a spy, and no
+modesty restrained him from proclaiming his knowledge.  But
+whatever insults were thrown at the Abb<e'> he received with a
+grin complacent as Shylock's, for was he not conscious that when
+he liked the pound of flesh was his own!
+
+With a fiend's duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death. 
+The Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in
+the blue room (whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue),
+though never, upon the oath of an Abb<e'>, when the key was
+turned in the lock.  A journey to Switzerland had freed him from
+the haunting suspicion of the Marquis, and at last he might
+compel the wife to denounce her husband as a murderer.  The
+terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abb<e'>'s dictation,
+and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly
+thrust into prison.  Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into
+an expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was
+committed by a masterpiece of cunning.  `Your father's one chance
+of escape,' argued this villain in a cassock, `is to be proved an
+inhuman ruffian.  Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you
+will save him from the guillotine.'  All the dupes learned their
+lesson with a certainty which reflects infinite credit upon the
+Abb<e'>'s method of instruction.
+
+For once in his life the Abb<e'> had been moved by greed as well
+as by villainy.  His early exploits had no worse motive than the
+satisfaction of an inhuman lust for cruelty and destruction.  But
+the Marquise was rich, and when once her husband's head were off,
+might not the Abb<e'> reap his share of the gathered harvest? 
+The stakes were high, but the game was worth the playing, and
+Rosselot played it with spirit and energy unto the last card. 
+His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as his ferret eyes
+glinted through glass at the President, he seemed the
+villain of some Middle Age Romance.  His head, poised upon a
+lean, bony frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as
+the blade of a knife; his tightly compressed lips were an
+indication of the rascal's determination.  `Long as a day in
+Lent'--that is how a spectator described him; and if ever a
+sinister nature glared through a sinister figure, the Abb<e'>'s
+character was revealed before he parted his lips in speech. 
+Unmoved he stood and immovable; he treated the imprecations of
+the Marquis with a cold disdain; as the burden of proof grew
+heavy on his back, he shrugged his shoulders in weary
+indifference.  He told his monstrous story with a cynical
+contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and
+priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis
+himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary.  He
+brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an
+insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim.  He
+described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in
+a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer
+than upon a pious Abb<e'>.  And, his story ended, he leered at
+the Court with the satisfaction of one who had discharged a
+fearsome duty.
+
+But his rascality overshot its mark; the Marquise, obedient to
+his priestly casuistry, displayed too fierce a zeal in the
+execution of his commands.  And he took to flight, hoping to lose
+in the larger world of Paris the notoriety which his prowess won
+him among the poor despised Berrichons.  He left behind for
+our consolation a snatch of philosophy which helps to explain his
+last and greatest achievement.  `Those who have money exist only
+to be fleeced.'  Thus he spake with a reckless revelation of
+self.  Yet the mystery of his being is still unpierced.  He is
+traitor, schemer, spy; but is he an Abb<e'>?  Perhaps not.  At
+any rate, he once attended the `Messe des Morts,' and was heard
+to mumble a `Credo,' which, as every good Catholic remembers, has
+no place in that solemn service.
+
+
+----
+Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
+at the Edinburgh University Press
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext A Book of Scoundrels, by Charles Whibley
+
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