And Maclaine, with all the ostensible weaknesses of his kind, would claim regard for the strength that he knew not.  He occupied a costly apartment in St. James’s Street; his morning dress was a crimson damask banjam, a silk shag waistcoat, trimmed with lace, black velvet breeches, white silk stockings, and yellow morocco slippers; but since his magnificence added no jot to his courage, it was rather mean than admirable.  Indeed, his whole career was marred by the provincialism of his native manse.

And he was the adored of an intelligent age; he basked a few brief weeks in the noonday sun of fashion.

If distinction was not the heritage of the Eighteenth Century, its glory is that now and again a giant raised his head above the stature of a prevailing rectitude.  The art of verse was lost in rhetoric; the noble prose, invented by the Elizabethans, and refined under the Stuarts, was whittled away to common sense by the admirers of Addison and Steele.  Swift and Johnson, Gibbon and Fielding, were apparitions of strength in an amiable, ineffective age.  They emerged sudden from the impeccable greyness, to which they afforded an heroic contrast.  So, while the highway drifted—­drifted to a vulgar incompetence, the craft was illumined by many a flash of unexpected genius.  The brilliant achievements of Jonathan Wild and of Jack Sheppard might have relieved the gloom of the darkest era, and their separate masterpieces make some atonement for the environing cowardice and stupidity.  Above all, the Eighteenth Century was Newgate’s golden age; now for the first time and the last were the rules and customs of the Jug perfectly understood.  If Jonathan the Great was unrivalled in the art of clapping his enemies into prison, if Jack the Slip-string was supreme in the rarer art of getting himself out, even the meanest criminal of his time knew what was expected of him, so long as he wandered within the walled yard, or listened to the ministrations of the snuff-besmirched Ordinary.  He might show a lamentable lack of cleverness in carrying off his booty; he might prove a too easy victim to the wiles of the thief-catcher; but he never fell short of courage, when asked to sustain the consequences of his crime.

Newgate, compared by one eminent author to a university, by another to a ship, was a republic, whose liberty extended only so far as its iron door.  While there was no liberty without, there was licence within; and if the culprit, who paid for the smallest indiscretion with his neck, understood the etiquette of the place, he spent his last weeks in an orgie of rollicking lawlessness.  He drank, he ate, he diced; he received his friends, or chaffed the Ordinary; he attempted, through the well-paid cunning of the Clerk, to bribe the jury; and when every artifice had failed he went to Tyburn like a man.  If he knew not how to live, at least he would show a resentful world how to die.