Like Chatterton, like Rimbaud, Haggart came into the full possession of his talent while still a child.  A Barrington of fourteen, he knew every turn and twist of his craft, before he escaped from school.  His youthful necessities were munificently supplied by facile depredation, and the only hindrance to immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where he might fence his plunder.  Meanwhile he painted his soul black with wickedness.  Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable conduct of his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of Leith or the Golden Acre.  Though he knew not the seduction of whisky, he missed never a dance nor a raffle, joining the frolics of prigs and callets in complete forgetfulness of the shorter catechism.  In vain the kirk compared him to a ‘bottle in the smoke’; in vain the minister whispered of hell and the gallows; his heart hardened, as his fingers grew agile, and when, at sixteen, he left his father’s house for a sporting life, he had not his equal in the three kingdoms for cunning and courage.

His first accomplice was Barney M’Guire, who—­until a fourteen stretch sent him to Botany Bay—­played Clytus to David’s Alexander, and it was at Portobello Races that their brilliant partnership began.  Hitherto Haggart had worked by stealth; he had tracked his booty under the cloud of night.  Now was the moment to prove his prowess in the eye of day, to break with a past which he already deemed ignoble.  His heart leaped with the occasion:  he tackled his adventure with the hot-head energy of a new member, big with his maiden speech.  The victim was chosen in an instant:  a backer, whose good fortune had broken the bookmakers.  There was no thief on the course who did not wait, in hungry appetence, the sportsman’s descent from the stand; yet the novice outstripped them all.  ‘I got the first dive at his keek-cloy,’ he writes in his simple, heroic style, ’and was so eager on my prey, that I pulled out the pocket along with the money, and nearly upset the gentleman.’  A steady brain saved him from the consequence of an o’erbuoyant enthusiasm.  The notes were passed to Barney in a flash, and when the sportsman turned upon his assailant, Haggart’s hands were empty.

Thereupon followed an infinite series of brilliant exploits.  With Barney to aid, he plundered the Border like a reiver.  He stripped the yeomen of Tweedside with a ferocity which should have avenged the disgrace of Flodden.  More than once he ransacked Ecclefechan, though it is unlikely that he emptied the lean pocket of Thomas Carlyle.  There was not a gaff from Newcastle to the Tay which he did not haunt with sedulous perseverance; nor was he confronted with failure, until his figure became a universal terror.  His common method was to price a horse, and while the dealer showed Barney the animal’s teeth, Haggart would slip under the uplifted arm, and ease the blockhead of his blunt.  Arrogant in his skill, delighted with his manifold triumphs,