The Education Act, which made
the cheap novel a necessity, destroyed at a blow the literature of the
street. Since the highwayman wandered, fur-coated, into the City, the
patterer has lost his occupation. Robbery and murder have degenerated
into Chinese puzzles, whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the
idle brain. The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot
literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of
Captain Smith. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and it
is a false reflection of M. Dupin, which dazzles the eye of a moral and
unimaginative world. Yet the wise man sighs for those fearless days,
when the brilliant Macheath rode vizarded down Shooter's Hill, and
presently saw his exploits set forth, with the proper accompaniment of a
renowned and ancient woodcut, upon a penny broadside.
CAPTAIN HIND
JAMES HIND, the Master Thief of England, the fearless Captain of the
Highway, was born at Chipping Norton in 1618. His father, a simple
saddler, had so poor an appreciation of his son's magnanimity, that he
apprenticed him to a butcher; but Hind's destiny was to embrue his
hands in other than the blood of oxen, and he had not long endured the
restraint of this common craft when forty shillings, the gift of
his mother, purchased him an escape, and carried him triumphant and
ambitious to London.
Even in his negligent schooldays he had fastened upon a fitting
career. A born adventurer, he sought only enterprise and command: if a
commission in the army failed him, then he would risk his neck upon the
road, levying his own tax and imposing his own conditions.
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