III—­A PARALLEL

(Sheppard and cartouche)

If the seventeenth century was the golden age of the hightobyman, it was at the advent of the eighteenth that the burglar and street-robber plied their trade with the most distinguished success, and it was the good fortune of both Cartouche and Sheppard to be born in the nick of time.  Rivals in talent, they were also near contemporaries, and the Scourge of Paris may well have been famous in the purlieus of Clare Market before Jack the Slip-String paid the last penalty of his crimes.  As each of these great men harboured a similar ambition, so their careers are closely parallel.  Born in a humble rank of life, Jack, like Cartouche, was the architect of his own fortune; Jack, like Cartouche, lived to be flattered by noble dames and to claim the solicitude of his Sovereign; and each owed his pre-eminence rather to natural genius than to a sympathetic training.

But, for all the Briton’s artistry, the Frenchman was in all points save one the superior.  Sheppard’s brain carried him not beyond the wants of to-day and the extortions of Poll Maggot.

Who knows but he might have been a respectable citizen, with never a chance for the display of his peculiar talent, had not hunger and his mistress’s greed driven him upon the pad?  History records no brilliant robbery of his own planning, and so circumscribed was his imagination that he must needs pick out his own friends and benefactors for depredation.  His paltry sense of discipline permitted him to be betrayed even by his brother and pupil, and there was no cracksman of his time over whose head he held the rod of terror.  Even his hatred of Jonathan Wild was the result not of policy but of prejudice.  Cartouche, on the other hand, was always perfect when at work.  The master of himself, he was also the master of his fellows.  There was no detail of civil war that he had not made his own, and he still remains, after nearly two centuries, the greatest captain the world has seen.  Never did he permit an enterprise to fail by accident; never was he impelled by hunger or improvidence to fight a battle unprepared.  His means were always neatly fitted to their end, as is proved by the truth that, throughout his career, he was arrested but once, and then not by his own inadvertence but by the treachery of others.

Yet from the moment of arrest Jack Sheppard asserted his magnificent superiority.  If Cartouche was a sorry bungler at prison-breaking, Sheppard was unmatched in this dangerous art.  The sport of the one was to break in, of the other to break out.  True, the Briton proved his inferiority by too frequently placing himself under lock and key; but you will forgive his every weakness for the unexampled skill wherewith he extricated himself from the stubbornest dungeon.  Cartouche would scarce have given Sheppard a menial’s office in his gang.  How cordially Sheppard would have despised Cartouche’s solitary experiment in escape!  To be foiled by a dog and a boxmaker’s daughter!  Would not that have seemed contemptible to the master breaker of those unnumbered doors and walls which separate the Castle from the freedom of Newgate roof?