Thus died the most famous highwayman that ever drew rein upon an English
road; and he died the death of a hero. The unnumbered crimes of violence
and robbery wherewith he might have been charged weighed not a feather's
weight upon his destiny; he suffered not in the cause of plunder, but
in the cause of Charles Stuart. And in thus excusing his death, his
contemporaries did him scant justice. For while in treasonable loyalty
he had a thousand rivals, on the road he was the first exponent of the
grand manner. The middle of the seventeenth century was, in truth, the
golden age of the Road. Not only were all the highwaymen Cavaliers,
but many a Cavalier turned highwayman. Broken at their King's defeat,
a hundred captains took pistol and vizard, and revenged themselves as
freebooters upon the King's enemies. And though Hind was outlaw first
and royalist afterwards, he was still the most brilliant collector of
them all. If he owed something to his master, Allen, he added from the
storehouse of his own genius a host of new precepts, and was the first
to establish an enduring tradition.
Before all things he insisted upon courtesy; a guinea stolen by an
awkward ruffian was a sorry theft; levied by a gentleman of the highway,
it was a tribute paid to courage by generosity. Nothing would atone for
an insult offered to a lady; and when it was Hind's duty to seize part
of a gentlewoman's dowry on the Petersfield road, he not only pleaded
his necessity in eloquent excuse, but he made many promises on behalf of
knight-errantry and damsels in distress.
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