ed to be convinced, he might very easily have discovered that
highwaymen and housebreakers did frequent the theatre, and that nothing
was more probable than that a laughable representation of successful
villany should induce the young and the already vicious to imitate it.
Besides, there is the weighty authority of Sir John Fielding, the chief
magistrate of Bow Street, who asserted positively, and proved his
assertion by the records of his office, that the number of thieves was
greatly increased at the time when that opera was so popular.

[50] Lavinia Fenton, afterwards Duchess of Bolton.

We have another instance of the same result much nearer our own times.
Schiller's _Raeuber_, that wonderful play, written by a green youth,
perverted the taste and imagination of all the young men in Germany. An
accomplished critic of our own country (Hazlitt), speaking of this play,
says it was the first he ever read, and such was the effect it produced on
him, that "it stunned him, like a blow." After the lapse of
five-and-twenty years, he could not forget it; it was still, to use his
own words, "an old dweller in the chambers of his brain," and he had not
even then recovered enough from it to describe how it was. The
high-minded, metaphysical thief, its hero, was so warmly admired, that
several raw students, longing to imitate a character they thought so
noble, actually abandoned their homes and their colleges, and betook
themselves to the forests and the wilds to levy contributions upon
travellers. They thought they would, like Moor, plunder the rich, and
deliver eloquent soliloquies to the setting sun or the rising moon;
relieve the poor when they met them, and drink flasks of Rhenish with
their free companions in rugged mountain passes, or in tents in the
thicknesses of the forests. But a little experience wonderfully cooled
their courage; they found that real, everyday robbers were very unlike the
conventional banditti of the stage, and that three months in prison, with
bread and water for their fare, and damp straw to lie upon, was very well
to read about by their own firesides, but not very agreeable to undergo in
their own proper persons.

Lord Byron, with his soliloquising, high-souled thieves, has, in a slight
degree, perverted the taste of the juvenile rhymers of his country. As
yet, however, they have shewn more good sense than their fellows of
Germany, and have not taken to the woods or the highways. Much as they