His acquaintance with Moll Cutpurse, casually begun at a bull-baiting, speedily ripened, for her into friendship, for him into love.  In this, the solitary romance of his life, Ralph Briscoe overtopped even his own achievements of courage.  The Roaring Girl was no more young, and years had not refined her character unto gentleness.  It was still her habit to appear publicly in jerkin and galligaskins, to smoke tobacco in contempt of her sex, and to fight her enemies with a very fury of insolence.  In stature she exceeded the limping clerk by a head, and she could pick him up with one hand, like a kitten.  Yet he loved her, not for any grace of person, nor beauty of feature, nor even because her temperament was undaunted as his own.  He loved her for that wisest of reasons, which is no reason at all, because he loved her.  In his eyes she was the Queen, not of Misrule, but of Hearts.  Had a throne been his, she should have shared it, and he wooed her with a shy intensity, which ennobled him, even in her austere regard.  Alas! she was unable to return his passion, and she lamented her own obduracy with characteristic humour.  She made no attempt to conceal her admiration.  ‘A notable and famous person,’ she called him, confessing that, ’he was right for her tooth, and made to her mind in every part of him.’  He had been bred up in the same exercise of bull-baiting, which was her own delight; she had always praised his towardliness, and prophesied his preferment.  But when he paid her court she was obliged to decline the honour, while she esteemed the compliment.

In truth, she was completely insensible to passion, or, as she exclaimed in a phrase of brilliant independence, ’I should have hired him to my embraces.’

The sole possibility that remained was a Platonic friendship, and Briscoe accepted the situation in excellent humour.  ’Ever since he came to know himself,’ again it is Moll that speaks, ’he always deported himself to me with an abundance of regard, calling me his Aunt.’  And his aunt she remained unto the end, bound to him in a proper and natural alliance.  Different as they were in aspect, they were strangely alike in taste and disposition.  Nor was the Paris Garden their only meeting-ground.

His sorry sojourn in Gray’s Inn had thrown him on the side of the law-breaker, and he had acquired a strange cunning in the difficult art of evading justice.  Instantly Moll recognised his practical value, and, exerting all her talent for intrigue, presently secured for him the Clerkship of Newgate.  Here at last he found scope not only for his learning, but for that spirit of adventure that breathed within him.  His meagre acquaintance with letters placed him on a pinnacle high above his colleagues.  Now and then a prisoner proved his equal in wit, but as he was manifestly superior in intelligence to the Governor, the Ordinary, and all the warders, he speedily seized and hereafter retained the real sovereignty of Newgate.