ood. Moreover, she shone in a gayer, more splendid epoch.
The worthy contemporary of Shakespeare, she had small difficulty in
performing feats of prowess and resource which daunted the intrepid
ruffians of the eighteenth century. Her period, in brief, gave her an
eternal superiority; and it were as hopeless for Otway to surpass
the master whom he disgraced, as for Wild to o'ershadow the brilliant
example of Moll Cutpurse.

Tyrants both, they exercised their sovereignty in accordance with their
varying temperament. Hers was a fine, fat, Falstaffian humour, which,
while it inspired Middleton, might have suggested to Shakespeare an
equal companion of the drunken knight. His was but a narrow, cynic wit,
not edged like the knife, which wellnigh cut his throat, but blunt and
scratching like a worn-toothed saw.

She laughed with a laugh that echoed from Ludgate to Charing Cross, and
her voice drowned all the City. He grinned rarely and with malice;
he piped in a voice shrill and acid as the tricks of his mischievous
imagination. She knew no cruelty beyond the necessities of her life,
and none regretted more than she the inevitable death of a traitor.
He lusted after destruction with a fiendish temper, which was a grim
anticipation of De Sade; he would even smile as he saw the noose tighten
round the necks of the poor innocents he had beguiled to Tyburn. It was
his boast that he had contrived robberies for the mere glory of dragging
his silly victims to the gallows. But Moll, though she stood half-way
between the robber and his prey, would have sacrificed a hundred
well-earned commissions rather than see her friends and comrades
strangled. Her temperament compelled her to the loyal support of her own
order, and she would have shrunk in horror from her rival, who, for all
his assumed friendship with the thief, was a staunch and subtle ally of
justice.

Before all things she had the genius of success. Her public offences
were trivial and condoned. She died in her bed, full of years and of
honours, beloved by the light-fingered gentry, reverenced by all the
judges on the bench. He, for all the sacrifices he made to a squint-eyed
law, died execrated alike by populace and police. Already Blueskin had
done his worst with a pen-knife; already Jack Sheppard and his comrades
had warned Drury Lane against the infamous thief-catcher. And so
anxious, on the other hand, was the law to be quit of their too zealous
servant, that an Act of