But the easier explanation is, as always, the more satisfactory;
and there is little doubt that in versatility the thief surpassed his
historian.
Had the chap-books still been scattered in disregarded corners, they
would have been unknown or misunderstood. Happily, a man of genius
came in the nick to convert them into as vivid and sparkling a piece
of literature as the time could show. This was Captain Alexander Smith,
whose Lives of the Highwaymen, published in 1719, was properly described
by its author as 'the first impartial piece of this nature which ever
appeared in English.' Now, Captain Smith inherited from a nameless
father no other patrimony than a fierce loyalty to the Stuarts, and the
sanguine temperament which views in horror a well-ordered life. Though
a mere foundling, he managed to acquire the rudiments, and he was not
wholly unlettered when at eighteen he took to the road. His courage,
fortified by an intimate knowledge of the great tradition, was rewarded
by an immediate success, and he rapidly became the master of so
much leisure as enabled him to pursue his studies with pleasure and
distinction. When his companions damned him for a milksop, he was
loftily contemptuous, conscious that it was not in intelligence alone
that he was their superior. While the Stuarts were the gods of his
idolatry, while the Regicides were the fiends of his frank abhorrence,
it was from the Elizabethans that he caught the splendid vigour of his
style; and he owed not only his historical sense, but his living English
to the example of Philemon Holland.
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