knew the passion of love, she was always loyal to
the obligation of friendship. By her will she left twenty pounds to
celebrate the Second Charles's restoration to his kingdom; and you
contemplate her career with the single regret that she died a brief year
before the red wine, thus generously bestowed, bubbled at the fountain.

II--JONATHAN WILD

WHEN Jonathan Wild and the Count La Ruse, in Fielding's narrative, took
a hand at cards, Jonathan picked his opponent's pocket, though he knew
it was empty, while the Count, from sheer force of habit, stacked the
cards, though Wild had not a farthing to lose. And if in his uncultured
youth the great man stooped to prig with his own hand, he was early
cured of the weakness: so that Fielding's picture of the hero taking a
bottle-screw from the Ordinary's pocket in the very moment of death is
entirely fanciful. For 'this Machiavel of Thieves,' as a contemporary
styled him, left others to accomplish what his ingenuity had planned.
His was the high policy of theft. If he lived on terms of familiar
intimacy with the mill-kens, the bridle-culls, the buttock-and-files
of London, he was none the less the friend and minister of justice. He
enjoyed the freedom of Newgate and the Old Bailey. He came and went as
he liked: he packed juries, he procured bail, he manufactured evidence;
and there was scarce an assize or a sessions passed but he slew his man.

The world knew him for a robber, yet could not refuse his brilliant
service. At the Poultry Counter, you are told, he laid the foundations
of his future greatness, and to the Poultry Counter he was committed for
some trifling debt ere he had fully served his apprenticeship to the
art and mystery of buckle-making. There he learned his craft, and at his
enlargement he was able forthwith to commence thief-catcher. His plan
was conceived with an effrontery that was nothing less than genius.
On the one side he was the factor, or rather the tyrant, of the
cross-coves: on the other he was the trusted agent of justice, the
benefactor of the outraged and the plundered. Among his earliest
exploits was the recovery of the Countess of G--d--n's chair, impudently
carried off when her ladyship had but just alighted; and the courage
wherewith he brought to justice the murderers of one Mrs. Knap, who had
been slain for some trifling booty, established his reputation as upon
a rock. He at once advertised himself in the public prints as
Thief-Catc