Before all things she had the genius of success.  Her public offences were trivial and condoned.  She died in her bed, full of years and of honours, beloved by the light-fingered gentry, reverenced by all the judges on the bench.  He, for all the sacrifices he made to a squint-eyed law, died execrated alike by populace and police.  Already Blueskin had done his worst with a pen-knife; already Jack Sheppard and his comrades had warned Drury Lane against the infamous thief-catcher.  And so anxious, on the other hand, was the law to be quit of their too zealous servant, that an Act of Parliament was passed with the sole object of placing Jonathan’s head within the noose.  His method, meagre though masterly, lulled him too soon to an impotent security.  She, with her larger view of life, her plumper sense of style, was content with nothing less than an ultimate sovereignty, and manifestly did she prove her superiority.

Though born for the wimple, she was more of a man than the breeched and stockinged Jonathan, whose only deed of valiance was to hang, terrier-like, by his teeth to an evasive enemy.  While he cheated at cards and cogged the dice, she trained dogs and never missed a bear-baiting.  He shrank, like the coward that he was, from the exercise of manly sports; she cared not what were the weapons—­quarterstaff or broadsword—­so long as she vanquished her opponent.  She scoured the town in search of insult; he did but exert his cunning when a quarrel was put upon him.  Who, then, shall deny her manhood?  Who shall whisper that his style was the braver or the better suited to his sex?

As became a hero, she kept the best of loose company:  her parlour was ever packed with the friends of loyalty and adventure.  Are not Hind and Mull Sack worth a thousand Blueskins?  Moreover, plunder and wealth were not the only objects of her pursuit:  she was not merely a fence but a patriot, and she would have accounted a thousand pounds well lost, if she did but compass the discomfiture of a Parliament-man.  Indeed, if Jonathan, the thief-catcher, limped painfully after his magnificent example, Jonathan the man and the sportsman confessed a pitiful inferiority to the valiant Moll.  Thus she avenged her sex by distancing the most illustrious of her rivals; and if he pleads for his credit a taste for theology, hers is the chuckle of contemptuous superiority.  She died a patriot, bequeathing a fountain of wine to the champions of an exiled king; he died a casuist, setting crabbed problems to the Ordinary.  Here, again, the advantage is evident:  loyalty is the virtue of men; a sudden attachment to religion is the last resource of the second-rate citizen and of the trapped criminal.

RALPH BRISCOE