Parliament was passed with the sole object of
placing Jonathan's head within the noose. His method, meagre though
masterly, lulled him too soon to an impotent security. She, with her
larger view of life, her plumper sense of style, was content with
nothing less than an ultimate sovereignty, and manifestly did she prove
her superiority.

Though born for the wimple, she was more of a man than the breeched
and stockinged Jonathan, whose only deed of valiance was to hang,
terrier-like, by his teeth to an evasive enemy. While he cheated
at cards and cogged the dice, she trained dogs and never missed a
bear-baiting. He shrank, like the coward that he was, from the exercise
of manly sports; she cared not what were the weapons--quarterstaff or
broadsword--so long as she vanquished her opponent. She scoured the town
in search of insult; he did but exert his cunning when a quarrel was put
upon him. Who, then, shall deny her manhood? Who shall whisper that his
style was the braver or the better suited to his sex?

As became a hero, she kept the best of loose company: her parlour was
ever packed with the friends of loyalty and adventure. Are not Hind and
Mull Sack worth a thousand Blueskins? Moreover, plunder and wealth were
not the only objects of her pursuit: she was not merely a fence but a
patriot, and she would have accounted a thousand pounds well lost, if
she did but compass the discomfiture of a Parliament-man. Indeed, if
Jonathan, the thief-catcher, limped painfully after his magnificent
example, Jonathan the man and the sportsman confessed a pitiful
inferiority to the valiant Moll. Thus she avenged her sex by distancing
the most illustrious of her rivals; and if he pleads for his credit a
taste for theology, hers is the chuckle of contemptuous superiority. She
died a patriot, bequeathing a fountain of wine to the champions of
an exiled king; he died a casuist, setting crabbed problems to the
Ordinary. Here, again, the advantage is evident: loyalty is the virtue
of men; a sudden attachment to religion is the last resource of the
second-rate citizen and of the trapped criminal.

RALPH BRISCOE

A SPARE, lean frame; a small head set forward upon a pair of sloping
shoulders; a thin, sharp nose, and rat-like eyes; a flat, hollow chest;
shrunk shanks, modestly retreating from their snuff-coloured hose--these
are the tokens which served to remind his friends of Ralph Briscoe, the
Clerk of Newgate. As he left the priso