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

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.