ir coarse paper, and their clumsy, characteristic
woodcuts--the chap-books, which none can contemplate without an
enchanted sentiment. Here at last you come upon a literature, which has
been read to pieces. The very rarity of the slim, rough volumes, proves
that they have been handed from one greedy reader to another, until the
great libraries alone are rich enough to harbour them. They do not
boast the careful elegance of a famous press: many of them came from the
printing-office of a country town: yet the least has a simplicity and
concision, which are unknown in this age of popular fiction. Even their
lack of invention is admirable: as the same woodcut might be used to
represent Guy, Earl of Warwick, or the last highwayman who suffered
at Tyburn, so the same enterprise is ascribed with a delightful
ingenuousness to all the heroes who rode abroad under the stars to fill
their pockets.

The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey delighted England in 1605, and
was the example of after ages. The anecdote of the road was already
crystallised, and henceforth the robber was unable to act contrary to
the will of the chap-book. Thus there grew up a folk-lore of thievery:
the very insistence upon the same motive suggests the fairytale, and, as
in the legends of every country, there is an identical element which the
anthropologists call 'human'; so in the annals of adventure there is
a set of invariable incidents, which are the essence of thievery. The
industrious hacks, to whom we owe the entertainment of the chap-books,
being seedy parsons or lawyers' clerks, were conscious of their literary
deficiencies: they preferred to obey tradition rather than to invent
ineptitudes. So you may trace the same jest, the same intrigue through
the unnumbered lives of three centuries. And if, being a philosopher,
you neglect the obvious plagiarism, you may induce from these
similarities a cunning theory concerning the uniformity of the human
brain. But the easier explanation is, as always, the more satisfactory;
and there is little doubt that in versatility the thief surpassed his
historian.

Had the chap-books still been scattered in disregarded corners, they
would have been unknown or misunderstood. Happily, a man of genius
came in the nick to convert them into as vivid and sparkling a piece
of literature as the time could show. This was Captain Alexander Smith,
whose Lives of the Highwaymen, published in 1719, was properly described
by its a