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.

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
charac