Thus livelier jests and madder exploits were fathered upon him than
upon any of his kind, and he has remained for two centuries the prime
favourite of the chap-books.
Robbing alone, he could afford to despise pedantry: did he meet a
traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the pass-word ('the
fiddler's paid,' or what not), as though the highway had not its code
of morals; nor did he scruple, when it served his purpose, to rob the
bunglers of his own profession. By this means, indeed, he raised the
standard of the Road and warned the incompetent to embrace an easier
trade. While he never took a shilling without sweetening his depredation
with a joke, he was, like all humorists, an acute philosopher. 'Remember
what I tell you,' he said to the foolish persons who once attempted to
rob him, the master-thief of England, 'disgrace not yourself for small
sums, but aim high, and for great ones; the least will bring you to the
gallows.' There, in five lines, is the whole philosophy of thieving, and
many a poor devil has leapt from the cart to his last dance because he
neglected the counsel of the illustrious Hind. Among his aversions were
lawyers and thief-catchers. 'Truly I could wish,' he exclaimed in court,
'that full-fed fees were as little used in England among lawyers as the
eating of swine's flesh was among the Jews.' When you remember the terms
of friendship whereon he lived with Moll Cutpurse, his hatred of the
thief-catcher, who would hang his brother for 'the lucre of ten pounds,
which is the reward,' or who would swallow a false oath 'as easily as
one would swallow buttered fish,' is a trifle mysterious.
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