It was he who discovered the wealth and habit of the victim; it was he who posted the thief and seized the plunder, giving a paltry commission to his hirelings for the trouble; it was he who kept whatever valuables were lost in the transaction; and as he was the servant of the Court, discovery or inconvenience was impossible.  Surely the Machiavel of Thieves is justified of his title.  He was known to all the rich and titled folk in town; and if he was generally able to give them back their stolen valuables at something more than double their value, he treated his clients with a most proper insolence.  When Lady M—­n was unlucky enough to lose a silver buckle at Windsor, she asked Wild to recover it, and offered the hero twenty pounds for his trouble.  ’Zounds, Madam,’ says he, ’you offer nothing.  It cost the gentleman who took it forty pounds for his coach, equipage, and other expenses to Windsor.’  His impudence increased with success, and in the geniality of his cups he was wont to boast his amazing rogueries:  ’hinting not without vanity at the poor Understandings of the Greatest Part of Mankind, and his own Superior Cunning.’

In fifteen years he claimed L10,000 for his dividend of recovered plunderings, and who shall estimate the moneys which flowed to his treasury from blackmail and the robberies of his gang?  So brisk became his trade in jewels and the precious metals that he opened relations with Holland, and was master of a fleet.  His splendour increased with wealth:  he carried a silver-mounted sword, and a footman tramped at his heels.  ‘His table was very splendid,’ says a biographer:  ’he seldom dining under five Dishes, the Reversions whereof were generally charitably bestow’d on the Commonside felons.’  At his second marriage with Mrs. Mary D—­n, the hempen widow of Scull D—­n, his humour was most happily expressed:  he distributed white ribbons among the turnkeys, he gave the Ordinary gloves and favours, he sent the prisoners of Newgate several ankers of brandy for punch.  ’Twas a fitting complaisance, since his fortune was drawn from Newgate, and since he was destined himself, a few years later, to drink punch—­’a liquor nowhere spoken against in the Scriptures’—­with the same Ordinary whom he thus magnificently decorated.  Endowed with considerable courage, for a while he had the prudence to save his skin, and despite his bravado he was known on occasion to yield a plundered treasure to an accomplice who set a pistol to his head.  But it is certain that the accomplice died at Tyburn for his pains, and on equal terms Jonathan was resolute with the best.  On the trail he was savage as a wild beast.  When he arrested James Wright for a robbery committed upon the persons of the Earl of B—­l—­n and the Lord Bruce, he held on to the victim’s chin by his teeth—­an exploit which reminds you of the illustrious Tiger Roche.