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 author as ’the first impartial piece of this nature which ever appeared in English.’  Now, Captain Smith inherited from a nameless father no other patrimony than a fierce loyalty to the Stuarts, and the sanguine temperament which views in horror a well-ordered life.  Though a mere foundling, he managed to acquire the rudiments, and he was not wholly unlettered when at eighteen he took to the road.  His courage, fortified by an intimate knowledge of the great tradition, was rewarded by an immediate success, and he rapidly became the master of so much leisure as enabled him to pursue his studies with pleasure and distinction.  When his companions damned him for a milksop, he was loftily contemptuous, conscious that it was not in intelligence alone that he was their superior.  While the Stuarts were the gods of his idolatry, while the Regicides were the fiends of his frank abhorrence, it was from the Elizabethans that he caught the splendid vigour of his style; and he owed not only his historical sense, but his living English to the example of Philemon Holland.  Moreover, it is to his constant glory that, living at a time that preferred as well to attenuate the English tongue as to degrade the profession of the highway, he not only rode abroad with a fearless courtesy, but handled his own language with the force and spirit of an earlier age.

He wrote with the authority of courage and experience.  A hazardous career had driven envy and malice from his dauntless breast.  Though he confesses a debt to certain ’learned and eminent divines of the Church of England,’ he owed a greater debt to his own observation, and he knew—­none better—­how to recognise with enthusiasm those deeds of daring which only himself has rivalled.  A master of etiquette, he distributed approval and censure with impartial hand; and he was quick to condemn the smallest infraction of an ancient law.  Nor was he insensible to the dignity of history.  The best models were always before him.  With admirable zeal he studied the manner of such masters as Thucydides and Titus Livius of Padua.  Above all, he realised the importance of setting appropriate speeches in the mouths of his characters; and, permitting his heroes to speak for themselves, he imparted to his work an irresistible air of reality and good faith.  His style, always studied, was neither too low nor too high for his subject.  An ill-balanced sentence was as hateful to him as a foul thrust or a stolen advantage.