The Bon Gaultier Ballads | Page 2

gloire d'estre diet et repute Bon Gaultier et bon Compaignon; en ce nom, suis bien venue en toutes bonnes compaignees de Pantagruelistes."
It was to one of these papers that I owed my introduction to Aytoun. What its nature was may be inferred from its title--"Flowers of Hemp; or, The Newgate Garland. By One of the Family." Like most of the papers on which we subsequently worked together, the object was not merely to amuse, but also to strike at some prevailing literary craze or vitiation of taste. I have lived to see many such crazes since. Every decade seems to produce one. But the particular craze against which this paper was directed was the popularity of novels and songs, of which the ruffians of the Newgate Calendar were the accepted heroes. If my memory does not deceive me, it began with Harrison Ainsworth's 'Rookwood,' in which the gallantries of Dick Turpin, and the brilliant description of his famous Ride to York, caught the public fancy. Encouraged by the success of this book, Ainsworth next wooed the sympathies of the public for Jack Sheppard and his associates in his novel of that name. The novel was turned into a melodrama, in which Mrs Keeley's clever embodiment of that "marvellous boy" made for months and months the fortunes of the Adelphi Theatre; while the sonorous musical voice of Paul Bedford as Blueskin in the same play brought into vogue a song with the refrain,
"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"
which travelled everywhere, and made the patter of thieves and burglars "familiar in our mouths as household words." It deafened us in the streets, where it was as popular with the organ-grinders and German bands as Sullivan's brightest melodies ever were in a later day. It clanged at midday from the steeple of St Giles, the Edinburgh cathedral; {ix} it was whistled by every dirty "gutter-snipe," and chanted in drawing-rooms by fair lips, that, little knowing the meaning of the words they sang, proclaimed to their admiring friends--
"In a box of the stone jug I was born,?Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn;?My noble father, as I've heard say,?Was a famous marchant of capers gay;"
ending with the inevitable and insufferable chorus,
"Nix my dolly, pals, fake away!"
Soon after the Newgate Calendar was appealed to for a hero by the author of 'Pelham,' who had already won no small distinction, and who in his 'Paul Clifford' did his best to throw a halo of romance around the highwayman's career. Not satisfied with this, Bulwer next claimed the sympathies of his readers for Eugene Aram, and exalted a very common type of murderer into a nobly minded and highly sentimental scholar. Crime and criminals became the favourite theme of a multitude of novelists of a lower class. They even formed the central interest of the 'Oliver Twist' of Charles Dickens, whose Fagin and his pupil "the Artful Dodger," Bill Sykes and Nancy, were simultaneously presented to us in their habits as they lived by the genius of George Cruikshank, with a power that gave a double interest to Dickens's masterly delineation of these worthies.
The time seemed--in 1841--to have come to open people's eyes to the dangerous and degrading taste of the hour, and it struck me that this might be done by pushing to still further extravagance the praises which had been lavishly bestowed upon the gentlemen whose career generally terminated in Newgate or on the Tyburn Tree, and by giving "the accomplishment of verse" to the sentiments and the language which formed the staple of the popular thieves' literature of the circulating libraries. The medium chosen was the review of a manuscript, supposed to be sent to the writer by a man who had lived so fully up to his own convictions as to the noble vocation of those who set law at defiance, and lived by picking pockets, burglary, and highway robbery, diversified by an occasional murder, that, with the finisher of the law's assistance, he had ended his exploits in what the slang of his class called "a breakfast of hartichoke with caper sauce." How hateful the phrase! But it was one of many such popularly current in those days.
The author of my "Thieves' Anthology" was described in my paper as a well-born man of good education, who, having ruined himself by his bad habits, had fallen into the criminal ranks, but had not forgotten the _literae humaniores_ which he had learned at the Heidelberg University. Of the purpose with which he had written he spoke thus in what I described as the fragments of a preface to his Miscellany:--
"To rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the