James Maclaine, for instance, was the hero of his age.  In a history of cowards he would deserve the first place, and the ’Gentleman Highwayman,’ as he was pompously styled, enjoyed a triumph denied to many a victorious general.  Lord Mountford led half White’s to do him honour on the day of his arrest.  On the first Sunday, which he spent in Newgate, three thousand jostled for entrance to his cell, and the poor devil fainted three times at the heat caused by the throng of his admirers.  So long as his fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not take up his pen without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have robbed him near Hyde Park.  Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the white feather.  Not once was he known to take a purse with his own hand, the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses’ heads while his accomplice spoke with the passengers.  A poltroon before his arrest, in Court he whimpered and whinnied for mercy; he was carried to the cart pallid and trembling, and not even his preposterous finery availed to hearten him at the gallows.  Taxed with his timidity, he attempted to excuse himself on the inadmissible plea of moral rectitude.  ’I have as much personal courage in an honourable cause,’ he exclaimed in a passage of false dignity, ’as any man in Britain; but as I knew I was committing acts of injustice, so I went to them half loth and half consenting; and in that sense I own I am a coward indeed.’

The disingenuousness of this proclamation is as remarkable as its hypocrisy.  Well might he brag of his courage in an honourable cause, when he knew that he could never be put to the test.  But what palliation shall you find for a rogue with so little pride in his art, that he exercised it ‘half loth, half consenting’?  It is not in this recreant spirit that masterpieces are achieved, and Maclaine had better have stayed in the far Highland parish, which bred him, than have attempted to cut a figure in the larger world of London.  His famous encounter with Walpole should have covered him with disgrace, for it was ignoble at every point; and the art was so little understood, that it merely added a leaf to his crown of glory.  Now, though Walpole was far too well-bred to oppose the demand of an armed stranger, Maclaine, in defiance of his craft, discharged his pistol at an innocent head.  True, he wrote a letter of apology, and insisted that, had the one pistol-shot proved fatal, he had another in reserve for himself.  But not even Walpole would have believed him, had not an amiable faith given him an opportunity for the answering quip:  ‘Can I do less than say I will be hanged if he is?’

As Maclaine was a coward and no thief, so also he was a snob and no gentleman.  His boasted elegance was not more respectable than his art.  Fine clothes are the embellishment of a true adventurer; they hang ill on the sloping shoulders of a poltroon.