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 knighterrantry and damsels in distress.Never would he extort a trinket to which association had given a sentimental worth;during a long career he never left any man,save a Roundhead,penniless upon the road;nor was it his custom to strip the master without giving the man a trifle for his pains.His courage,moreover,was equal to his understanding.Since he was afraid of nothing,it was not his habit to bluster when he was not determined to have his way.When once his pistol was levelled,when once the solemn order was given,the victim must either fight or surrender;and Hind was never the man to decline a combat with any weapons and in any circumstances.
Like the true artist that he was,he neglected no detail of his craft.As he was a perfect shot,so also he was a finished horseman;and his skill not only secured him against capture,but also helped him to the theft of such horses as his necessities required,or to the exchange of a wornout jade for a mettled prancer.Once upon a time a credulous farmer offered twenty pounds and his own gelding for the Captain's mount.Hind struck a bargain at once,and as they jogged along the road he persuaded the farmer to set his newlypurchased horse at the tallest hedge,the broadest ditch.The bumpkin failed,as Hind knew he would fail;and,begging the loan for an instant of his ancient steed,Hind not only showed what horsemanship could accomplish,but straightway rode off with the better horse and twenty pounds in his pocket.So marvellously did his reputation grow,that it became a distinction to be outwitted by him,and the brains of innocent men were racked to invent tricks which might have been put upon them by the illustrious Captain.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 chapbooks.
Robbing alone,he could afford to despise pedantry:did he meet a traveller who amused his fancy he would give him the password (`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 masterthief 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 thiefcatchers.`Truly I could wish,'he exclaimed in court,`that fullfed 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 thiefcatcher,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.Perhaps before his death an estrangement divided Hind and Moll.Was it that the Roaring Girl was too anxious to take the credit of Hind's success?Or did he harbour the unjust suspicion that when the last descent was made upon him at the barber's,Moll might have given a friendly warning?
Of this he made no confession,but the honest thief was ever a liberal hater of spies and attorneys,and Hind's prudence is unquestioned.A miracle of intelligence,a master of style,he excelled all his contemporaries and set up for posterity an unattainable standard.The eighteenth century flattered him by its imitation;but cowardice and swagger compelled it to limp many a dishonourable league behind.Despite the single inspiration of dancing a corant upon the green,Claude Duval,compared to Hind,was an empty braggart.Captain Stafford spoiled the best of his effects with a more than brutal vice.
Neither MullSack nor the Golden Farmer,for all their long life and handsome plunder,are comparable for an instant to the robber of Peters and Bradshaw.They kept their fist fiercely upon the gold of others,and cared not by what artifice it was extorted.
Hind never took a sovereign meanly;he approached no enterprise which he did not adorn.Living in a true Augustan age,he was a classic among highwaymen,the very Virgil of the Pad.
