ers. Insolent and careless,
he lurched from prison to prison; now it was Armagh that held him,
now Downpatrick, until at last he was thrust on a general charge of
vagabondage and ill-company into Kilmainham, which has since harboured
many a less valiant adventurer than David Haggart. Here the culminating
disgrace overtook him: he was detected in the prison yard by his ancient
enemy, John Richardson, of Dumfries, who dragged him back to Scotland
heavily shackled and charged with murder. So nimble had he proved
himself in extrication, that his captors secured him with pitiless
severity; round his waist he carried an iron belt, whereto were
padlocked the chains, clanking at his wrists and ankles. Thus tortured
and helpless, he was fed 'like a sucking turkey in Bedlam'; but
his sorrows vanished, and his dying courage revived at sight of the
torchlight procession, which set forth from Dumfries to greet his
return.

His coach was hustled by a mob, thousands strong, eager to catch sight
of Haggart the Murderer, and though the spot where he slew Morrin was
like fire beneath his passing feet, he carried to his cell a heart and a
brain aflame with gratified vanity. His guilt being patent, reprieve was
as hopeless as acquittal, and after the assured condemnation he spent
his last few days with what profit he might in religious and literary
exercises. He composed a memoir, which is a model of its kind; so
diligently did he make his soul, that he could appear on the scaffold
in a chastened spirit of prayerful gratitude; and, being an eminent
scoundrel, he seemed a proper subject for the ministrations of Mr.
George Combe. 'That is the one thing I did not know before,' he
confessed with an engaging modesty, when his bumps were squeezed,
and yet he was more than a match for the amiable phrenologist, whose
ignorance of mankind persuaded him to believe that an illiterate felon
could know himself and analyse his character.

His character escaped his critics as it escaped himself. Time was
when George Borrow, that other picaroon, surprised the youthful David,
thinking of Willie Wallace upon the Castle Rock, and Lavengro's romantic
memory transformed the raw-boned pickpocket into a monumental hero, who
lacked nothing save a vast theatre to produce a vast effect. He was a
Tamerlane, robbed of his opportunity; a valiant warrior, who looked in
vain for a battlefield; a marauder who climbed the scaffold not for the
magnitude, but for the litt