himself would pass by Hounslow, rode forth to meet him, and with her own voice bade him stand and deliver.  One would like to believe it; yet it is scarce credible.  If Fairfax had spent the balance of an ignominious career in being plundered by a band of loyal brigands, he would not have had time to justify the innumerable legends of pockets emptied and pistols levelled at his head.  Moreover, Moll herself was laden with years, and she had always preferred the council chamber to the battlefield.  But it is certain that, with Captain Hind and Mull Sack to aid, she schemed many a clever plot against the Roundheads, and nobly she played her part in avenging the martyred King.

Thus she declined into old age, attended, like Queen Mary, by her maids, who would card, reel, spin, and beguile her leisure with sweet singing.  Though her spirit was untamed, the burden of her years compelled her to a tranquil life.  She, who formerly never missed a bull-baiting, must now content herself with tick-tack.  Her fortune, moreover, had been wrecked in the Civil War.  Though silver shells still jingled in her pocket, time was she knew the rattle of the yellow boys.  But she never lost courage, and died at last of a dropsy, in placid contentment with her lot.  Assuredly she was born at a time well suited to her genius.  Had she lived to-day, she might have been a ‘Pioneer’; she might even have discussed some paltry problem of sex in a printed obscenity.

In her own freer, wiser age, she was not man’s detractor, but his rival; and if she never knew the passion of love, she was always loyal to the obligation of friendship.  By her will she left twenty pounds to celebrate the Second Charles’s restoration to his kingdom; and you contemplate her career with the single regret that she died a brief year before the red wine, thus generously bestowed, bubbled at the fountain.

II—­JONATHAN WILD

When Jonathan Wild and the Count La Ruse, in Fielding’s narrative, took a hand at cards, Jonathan picked his opponent’s pocket, though he knew it was empty, while the Count, from sheer force of habit, stacked the cards, though Wild had not a farthing to lose.  And if in his uncultured youth the great man stooped to prig with his own hand, he was early cured of the weakness:  so that Fielding’s picture of the hero taking a bottle-screw from the Ordinary’s pocket in the very moment of death is entirely fanciful.  For ‘this Machiavel of Thieves,’ as a contemporary styled him, left others to accomplish what his ingenuity had planned.  His was the high policy of theft.  If he lived on terms of familiar intimacy with the mill-kens, the bridle-culls, the buttock-and-files of London, he was none the less the friend and minister of justice.  He enjoyed the freedom of Newgate and the Old Bailey.  He came and went as he liked:  he packed juries, he procured bail, he manufactured evidence; and there was scarce an assize or a sessions passed but he slew his man.