me exhort ye, then, to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of
repentance! Burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts, mount the
chimney of hope, take from thence the bar of good resolution, break
through the stone wall of despair, and all the strongholds in the dark
entry of the valley of the shadow of death! Raise yourselves to the leads
of divine meditation, fix the blanket of faith with the spike of the
Church, let yourselves down to the turner's house of resignation, and
descend the stairs of humility! So shall you come to the door of
deliverance from the prison of iniquity, and escape the clutches of that
old executioner the devil!"

Jonathan Wild, whose name has been immortalised by Fielding, was no
favourite with the people. He had none of the virtues which, combined with
crimes, make up the character of the great thief. He was a pitiful fellow,
who informed against his comrades, and was afraid of death. This meanness
was not to be forgiven by the crowd; and they pelted him with dirt and
stones on his way to Tyburn, and expressed their contempt by every
possible means. How different was their conduct to Turpin and Jack
Sheppard, who died in their neatest attire, with nosegays in their
button-holes, and with the courage that a crowd expects. It was
anticipated that the body of Turpin would have been delivered up to the
surgeons for dissection; and the people seeing some men very busily
employed in removing it, suddenly set upon them, rescued the body, bore it
about the town in triumph, and then buried it in a very deep grave, filled
with quicklime, to hasten the progress of decomposition. They would not
suffer the corpse of their hero--of the man who had ridden from London to
York in four-and-twenty hours--to be mangled by the rude hands of
unmannerly surgeons.

The death of Claude Duval would appear to have been no less triumphant.
Claude was a gentlemanly thief. According to Butler, in the famous ode to
his memory, he

"Taught the wild Arabs of the road
To rob in a more gentle mode;
Take prizes more obligingly than those
Who never had been bred _filous_;
And how to hang in a more graceful fashion
Than e'er was known before to the dull English nation."

In fact, he was the pink of politeness, and his gallantry to the fair sex
was proverbial. When he was caught at last, pent in "stone walls and
chains and iron grates," their grief was in proportion to his rare merits
and h