The Stone-Jug received him with deference and admiration.  Three hundred pounds weight of irons were put upon him for an adornment, and the Governor professed so keen a solicitude for his welfare that he never left him unattended.  There was scarce a beautiful woman in London who did not solace him with her condescension, and enrich him with her gifts.  Not only did the President of the Royal Academy deign to paint his portrait, but (a far greater honour) Hogarth made him immortal.  Even the King displayed a proper interest, demanding a full and precise account of his escapes.  The hero himself was drunk with flattery; he bubbled with ribaldry; he touched off the most valiant of his contemporaries in a ludicrous phrase.  But his chief delight was to illustrate his prowess to his distinguished visitors, and nothing pleased him better than to slip in and out of his chains.

Confronted with his judge, he forthwith proposed to rid himself of his handcuffs, and he preserved until the fatal tree an illimitable pride in his artistry.  Nor would he believe in the possibility of death.  To the very last he was confirmed in the hope of pardon; but, pardon failing him, his single consolation was that his procession from Westminster to Newgate was the largest that London had ever known, and that in the crowd a constable broke his leg.  Even in the Condemned Hole he was unreconciled.  If he had broken the Castle, why should he not also evade the gallows?  Wherefore he resolved to carry a knife to Tyburn that he might cut the rope, and so, losing himself in the crowd, ensure escape.  But the knife was discovered by his warder’s vigilance, and taken from him after a desperate struggle.  At the scaffold he behaved with admirable gravity:  confessing the wickeder of his robberies, and asking pardon for his enormous crimes.  ‘Of two virtues,’ he boasted at the self-same moment that the cart left him dancing without the music, ’I have ever cherished an honest pride:  never have I stooped to friendship with Jonathan Wild, or with any of his detestable thief-takers; and, though an undutiful son, I never damned my mother’s eyes.’

Thus died Jack Sheppard; intrepid burglar and incomparable artist, who, in his own separate ambition of prison-breaking, remains, and will ever remain, unrivalled.  His most brilliant efforts were the result neither of strength nor of cunning; for so slight was he of build, so deficient in muscle, that both Edgworth Bess and Mistress Maggot were wont to bang him to their own mind and purpose.  And an escape so magnificently planned, so bravely executed as was his from the Strong Room, is far greater than a mere effect of cunning.  Those mysterious gifts which enable mankind to batter the stone walls of a prison, or to bend the iron bars of a cage, were pre-eminently his.  It is also certain that he could not have employed his gifts in a more reputable profession.

II—­LOUIS-DOMINIQUE CARTOUCHE