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A Book of Scoundrels

by Charles Whibley

February, 1999  [Etext #1632]


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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

