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.
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