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

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.