The text of his `Memoirs'having been edited,it is scarce possible to define his literary talent.The book,as it stands,is an excellent piece of narrative,but it loses somewhat by the pretence of style.The man's invulnerable conceit prevented an absolute frankness,and there is little enough hilarity to correct the acid sentiment and the intolerable vows of repentance.Again,though he knows his subject,and can patter flash with the best,his incorrigible respectability leads him to ape the manner of a Grub Street hack,and to banish to a vocabulary those pearls of slang which might have added vigour and lustre to his somewhat tiresome page.However,the thief cannot escape his inevitable defects.The vanity,the weakness,the sentimentality of those who are born beasts of prey,yet have the faculty of depredation only halfdeveloped,are the foes of truth,and it is well to remember that the autobiography of a rascal is tainted at its source.A congenial pickpocket,equipped with the selfknowledge and the candour which would enable him to recognise himself an outlaw and justice his enemy rather than an instrument of malice,would prove a Napoleon rather than a Vaux.So that we must e'en accept our Newgate Calendar with its many faults upon its head,and be content.
For it takes a man of genius to write a book,and the thief who turns author commonly inhabits a paradise of the secondrate.
GEORGE BARRINGTON
AS Captain Hind was master of the road,George Barrington was (and remains for ever)the absolute monarch of pickpockets.
Though the art,superseding the cutting of purses,had been practised with courage and address for half a century before Barrington saw the light,it was his own incomparable genius that raised thievery from the dangerous valley of experiment,and set it,secure and honoured,upon the mountain height of perfection.
To a natural habit of depredation,which,being a man of letters,he was wont to justify,he added a sureness of hand,a fertility of resource,a recklessness of courage which drove his contemporaries to an amazed respect,and from which none but the Philistine will withhold his admiration.An accident discovered his taste and talent.At school he attempted to kill a companionthe one act of violence which sullies a strangely gentle career;and outraged at the affront of a flogging,he fled with twelve guineas and a gold repeater watch.A vulgar theft this,and no presage of future greatness;yet it proves the fearless greed,the contempt of private property,which mark as with a stigma the temperament of the prig.His faculty did not rust long for lack of use,and at Drogheda,when he was but sixteen,he encountered one Price,half barnstormer,half thief.
Forthwith he embraced the twin professions,and in the interlude of more serious pursuits is reported to have made a respectable appearance as Jaffier in Venice Preserved.For a while he dreamed of Drury Lane and glory;but an attachment for Miss Egerton,the Belvidera to his own Jaffier,was more costly than the barns of Londonderry warranted,and,with Price for a colleague,he set forth on a tour of robbery,merely interrupted through twenty years by a few periods of enforced leisure.
His youth,indeed,was his golden age.For four years he practised his art,chilled by no shadow of suspicion,and his immunity was due as well to his excellent bearing as to his sleight of hand.In one of the countless chapbooks which dishonour his fame,he is unjustly accused of relying for his effects upon an elaborate apparatus,half knife,half scissors,wherewith to rip the pockets of his victims.The mere backbiting of envy!An artistic triumph was never won save by legitimate means;and the hero who plundered the Dulce of Lr at Ranelagh,who emptied the pockets of his acquaintance without fear of exposure,who all but carried off the priceless snuffbox of Count Orloff,most assuredly followed his craft in full simplicity and with a proper scorn of clumsy artifice.At his first appearance he was the master,sumptuously apparelled,with Price for valet.At Dublin his birth and quality were never questioned,and when he made a descent upon London it was in company with Captain W.Hn,who remained for years his loyal friend.He visited Brighton as the chosen companion of Lord Ferrers and the wicked Lord Lyttelton.His manners and learning were alike irresistible.Though the picking of pockets was the art and interest of his life,he was on terms of easy familiarity with light literature,and he considered no toil too wearisome if only his conversation might dazzle his victims.Two maxims he charactered upon his heart:the one,never to run a large risk for a small gain;the other,never to forget the carriage and diction of a gentleman.
He never stooped to pilfer,until exposure and decay had weakened his hand.In his first week at Dublin he carried off <Pd>1000,and it was only his fateful interview with Sir John Fielding that gave him poverty for a bedfellow.Even at the end,when he slunk from town to town,a notorious outlaw,he had inspirations of his ancient magnificence,andat Chesterhe eluded the vigilance of his enemies and captured <Pd>600,wherewith he purchased some months of respectability.Now,respectability was ever dear to him,and it was at once his pleasure and profit to live in the highest society.Were it not blasphemy to sully Barrington with slang you would call him a member of the swellmob,but,having cultivated a grave and sober style for himself,he recoiled in horror from the flash lingo,and his susceptibility demands respect.
He kept a commonplace book!Was ever such thrift in a thief?
