CHAPTER XXIV. THE INAUGURATION. Beggar. Concert, sir! we have musicians, too, among us. True, merry beggars, indeed, that, being within the reach of the lash for singing libellous songs at London, were fain to fly into one covey, and here they sing all our poets' ditties. They can sing any thing, most tuneably, sir, but psalms. What they may do hereafter, under a triple tree, is much expected; but they live very civilly and genteelly among us. Spring. But, what is here that solemn old fellow, that neither speaks of himself, or any for him? : Beggar. O, sir, the rarest man of all he is a prophet. See how he holds up his prognosticating nose. He is divining now. Spring. How, a prophet? Beggar. Yes, sir; a cunning man, and a fortune teller; a very ancient stroller all the world over, and has travelled with gipsies: and is a patrico. The Merry Beggars. In consequence of some few words which the sexton let fall, in the presence of the attendants, during breakfast, more perhaps by design than accident, it was speedily rumoured throughout the camp that the redoubted Richard Turpin was for the time its inmate. This intelligence produced some such sensation as is experienced by the inhabitants of a petty town, on the sudden arrival of a prince of the blood, a commander-in-chief, or other illustrious and distinguished personage, whose fame has been vaunted abroad amongst his fellow-men by Rumour, "and her thousand tongues ;" and who, like our highwayman, has rendered himself sufficiently notorious to be an object of admiration and emulation amongst his contemporaries. All started up at the news. The upright man, the chief of the crew, arose from his chair, donned his gown of state, a very ancient brocade dressing gown, filched, most probably, from the wardrobe of some strolling player, grasped his baton of office, a stout oaken truncheon, and sallied forth. The ruffler, who found his representative in a very magnificently equipped, and by no means ill-favoured knave, whose chin was decorated with a beard as lengthy and as black as Sultan Mahmood's, together with the dexterous hooker, issued forth from the hovel which they termed their boozing ken, eager to catch دو a glimpse of the prince of the high toby gloaks. The limping Stark, errant, downright beggars. Ay, Couchant and passant, guardant, rampant beggars; The Each sun-burnt varlet started from his shed; each dusky dame, with her brown, half-naked urchins, followed at his heels; each "ripe, young maiden, with the glossy eye," lingered but to sleek her raven tresses, and to arrange her straw bonnet, and then overtook the others: each wrinkled beldame hobbled as quickly after as her stiffened joints would permit ; while the ancient patrico, the priest of the crew, (who joined the couples together by the hedge-side, "with the nice custom of dead horse betweent,") brought up the rear; all bent on one grand object that of having a peep at the "foremost man of all this prigging world !” Dick Turpin, at the period of which we treat, was in the zenith of his reputation. His deeds were full blown ; his exploits were in every man's mouth; and a heavy price was set upon his head. That he should show himself thus openly, where he might be so easily betrayed, excited no little surprise amongst the craftiest of the crew, and augured an excess of temerity on his part. Rash daring was the main feature of *The Merry Beggars. The parties to be wedded find out a dead horse, or any other beast, and standing one on the one side, and the other on the other, the patrico bids them live together till death do them part; and so shaking hands, the wedding dinner is kept at the next alehouse they stumble into, where the union is nothing but knocking of cannes, and the sauce, none but drunken brawles. DEKKAR. Turpin's character. Like our great Nelson, he knew fear only by name; and when he thus trusted himself into the hands of strangers, confident in himself and in his own resources, he felt perfectly easy as to the result. He relied also in the continuance of his good fortune, which had as yet never deserted him. Possessed of the belief that his hour was not yet come, he cared little or nothing for any risk he might incur; and though he might, undoubtedly, have some presentiment of the probable termination of his career, he never suffered it to militate against his present enjoyment, which proved that he was no despicable philosopher. Turpin was the ultimus Romanorum, the last of a race, which (we were almost about to say we regret) is now altogether extinct. Several successors he had, it is true, but no name worthy to be recorded after his own. With him, expired the chivalrous spirit which animated successively the bosoms of so many knights of the road; with him, died away that passionate love of enterprise, that high spirit of devotion to the fair sex, which was first breathed upon the highway by the gay, gallant Claude Du-Val, the Bayard of the road-Le filou sans peur et sans reproche - but which was extinguished at last by the cord that tied the heroic Turpin to the remorseless tree. It were a subject well worthy of inquiry, to trace this decline and fall of the empire of the tobymen to its remoter causes; to ascertain the why and the wherefore, that with so many half-pay captains; so many poor curates; so many lieutenants, of both services, without hopes of promotion; so many penny-a-liners, and fashionable novelists; so many damned dramatists, and damning critics; so many Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviewers; so many detrimental brothers, and younger sons; when there are horses to be hired, pistols to be borrowed, purses to be taken, and mails are as plentiful as partridges ;—it were worth serious investigation, we repeat, to ascertain why, with the best material imaginable for a new race of highwaymen, we have none, not so much as an amateur. Why do not some of these choice spirits quit the salons of Pall-Mall, and take to the road; the air of the heath is more bracing and wholesome, we should conceive, than that of any "hell" whatever, and the chances of success incomparably greater? We throw out this hint, without a doubt of seeing it followed up. Probably the solution of our inquiry may be, that the supply is greater than the de mand; that, in the present state of things, embryo highwaymen may be more abundant than purses; and then, have we not the horse patrol? With such an admirably-organised system of conservation, it is vain to anticipate a change. The highwaymen, we fear, like their Irish brothers, the Rapparees, went out with the Tories. They were averse to reform, and eschewed emancipation. Lest any one should think we have over-rated the pleasures of the highwaymen's existence, they shall hear what "the right villanous" Jack Hall, a celebrated tobyman of his day, has got to say on the subject. "His life (the highwayman's) has, generally, the most mirth and the least care in it of any man's breathing, and all he deals for is clear profit: he has that point of good conscience, that he always sells as he buys, a good pennyworth, which is something rare, since he trades with so small a stock. The fence* and he are like the devil and the doctor, they live by one another; and, like traitors, 'tis best to keep each other's counsel. He has this point of honesty, that he never robs the house he frequents;" (Turpin had the same scruples respecting the Hall of Rookwood in Sir Piers's lifetime ;) "and perhaps pays his debts better than some others, for he holds it below the dignity of his employment to commit so ungenteel a crime as insolvency, and loves to pay nobly. He has another quality, not much amiss, that he takes no more than he has occasion for;" (Jack, we think, was a little mistaken here,) "which he verifies this way; he craves no more while that lasts. He is a less nuisance in a commonwealth than a miser, because the money he engrosses all circulates again, which the other hoards as though 't were only to be found again at the day of judgment. He is the tithe-pig of his family, which the gallows, instead of the parson, claims as its due. He has reason enough to be bold in his undertakings, for though all the world threaten him, he stands in fear of but one man in it, and that's the hangman; and with him, too, he is generally in fée: however, I cannot affirm he is so valiant that he dares look any man in the face, for in that point he is now and then a little modest. Newgate may be said to be his country house, where he frequently lives so many months in the year, and he is not so much concerned to be carried thither for a small matter, if 't were only for the benefit of renewing * Receiver. his acquaintance there. He holds a petit larceny as light as a nun does auricular confession, though the priest has a more compassionate character than the hangman. Every man in this community is esteemed according to his particular quality, of which there are several degrees, though it is contrary often to public government; for here a man shall be valued purely for his merit, and rise by it too, though it be but to a halter, in which there is a great deal of glory in dying like a hero, and making a decent figure in the cart to the two last staves of the fifty-first psalm.” * This, we repeat, is the plain statement of a practical man, and again we throw out the hint for adoption. All we regret is, that we are now degenerated from the grand tobyman to the cracksman and the sneak, about whom there are no redeeming features. How much lower the next generation of thieves will dive, it boots not to conjecture: Ætas parentum pejor avis tulit, Nos nequiores; mox daturos, "Cervantes laughed Spain's chivalry away," sang Byron; and if Gay did not extinguish the failing flame of our night errantry, (unlike the Robbers of Schiller, which is said to have inflamed the Saxon youth with an irrepressible mania for brigandage,) the Beggar's Opera helped not to fan the dying fire. That laugh was fatal, as laughs generally are. Macheath gave the highwayman his coup de grace. The last of this race (for we must persist in maintaining that he was the last), Turpin, like the setting sun, threw up some parting rays of glory, and tinged the far highways with a lustre, that may yet be traced like a cloud of dust raised by his horse's retreating heels. Unequalled in the command of his steed, the most singular feat, that the whole race of the annals of horsemanship has to record, and of which we may have more to say hereafter, was achieved by him. So perfect was his jockeyship, so clever his management of the animal he mounted, so intimately acquainted was he with every cross-road in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, (a book of which he constructed, and carried constantly about his person,) as well as with many other parts of England, particularly the counties of Chester, York, and Lancaster, that he outstripped every pursuer, and baffled * Memoirs of the right villanous John Hall, the famous and notorious Robber, penned from his Mouth some Time before his Death, 1708. |