A Book of Scoundrels | Page 6

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