So far,then,their achievement is parallel.And parallel also is their taste for melodrama.Each employed means too great or too violent for the end in view.Gilderoy burnt houses and ravished women,when his sole object was the acquisition of money.SixteenString Jack terrified Bagnigge Wells with the dreadful announcement that he was a highwayman,when his kindly,stupid heart would have shrunk from the shedding of a drop of blood.So they both blustered through the world,the one in deed,the other in word;and both played their parts with so little refinement that they frightened the groundlings to a timid admiration.Here the resemblance is at an end.In the essentials of their trade Gilderoy was a professional,Rann a mere amateur.They both bullied;but,while SixteenString Jack was content to shout threats,and pick up halfacrown,Gilderoy breathed murder,and demanded a vast ransom.Only once in his career did the `disgraceful Scotsman'become gay and debonair.
Only once did he relax the tension of his frown,and pick pockets with the lightness and freedom of a gentleman.It was on his voyage to France that he forgot his old policy of arson and pillage,and truly the Court of the Great King was not the place for his rapacious cruelty.Jack Rann,on the other hand,would have taken life as a prolonged jest,if Sir John Fielding and the sheriffs had not checked his mirth.He was but a bungler on the road,with no more resource than he might have learned from the common chapbook,or from the dying speeches,hawked in Newgate Street.But he had a fine talent for merriment;he loved nothing so well as a smart coat and a pretty woman.Thieving was no passion with him,but a necessity.How could he dance at a masquerade or court his Ellen with an empty pocket?So he took to the road as the sole profession of an idle man,and he bullied his way from Hounslow to Epping in sheer lightness of heart.
After all,to rob Dr.Bell of eighteenpence was the work of a simpleton.It was a very pretty taste which expressed itself in a peagreen coat and deathless strings;and Rann will keep posterity's respect rather for the accessories of his art than for the art itself.On the other hand,you cannot imagine Gilderoy habited otherwise than in black;you cannot imagine this monstrous matricide taking pleasure in the smaller elegancies of life.From first to last he was the stern and beetlebrowed marauder,who would have despised the frippery of SixteenString Jack as vehemently as his sudden appearance would have frightened the foppish lover of Ellen Roach.
Their conduct with women is sufficient index of their character.
Jack Rann was too general a lover for fidelity.But he was amiable,even in his unfaithfulness;he won the undying affection of his Ellen;he never stood in the dock without a nosegay tied up by fair and nimble fingers;he was attended to Tyburn by a bevy of distinguished admirers.Gilderoy,on the other hand,approached women in a spirit of violence.His Sadic temper drove him to kill those whom he affected to love.And his cruelty was amply repaid.While Ellen Roach perjured herself to save the lover,to whose memory she professed a lifelong loyalty,it was Peg Cunningham who wreaked her vengeance in the betrayal of Gilderoy.He remained true to his character,when he ripped up the belly of his betrayer.This was the closing act of his life.
Rann,also,was consistent,even to the gallows.The night before his death he entertained seven women at supper,and outlaughed them all.The contrast is not so violent as it appears.The one act is melodrama,the other farce.And what is farce,but melodrama in a happier shape?
