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
second-rate.

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 companion--the 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 chap-books which dishonour his fame, he is unjustly