So long as his fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not
take up his pen without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have
robbed him near Hyde Park. Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the
white feather. Not once was he known to take a purse with his own hand,
the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses' heads while his
accomplice spoke with the passengers. A poltroon before his arrest, in
Court he whimpered and whinnied for mercy; he was carried to the cart
pallid and trembling, and not even his preposterous finery availed to
hearten him at the gallows. Taxed with his timidity, he attempted to
excuse himself on the inadmissible plea of moral rectitude. 'I have as
much personal courage in an honourable cause,' he exclaimed in a passage
of false dignity, 'as any man in Britain; but as I knew I was committing
acts of injustice, so I went to them half loth and half consenting; and
in that sense I own I am a coward indeed.'
The disingenuousness of this proclamation is as remarkable as its
hypocrisy. Well might he brag of his courage in an honourable cause,
when he knew that he could never be put to the test. But what palliation
shall you find for a rogue with so little pride in his art, that he
exercised it 'half loth, half consenting'? It is not in this recreant
spirit that masterpieces are achieved, and Maclaine had better have
stayed in the far Highland parish, which bred him, than have attempted
to cut a figure in the larger world of London.
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