Not only did he master the tradition of thievery; he vaunted his originality with the familiar complacence of the scoundrel.  Forgetting that it was by burglary that he was undone, he explains for his public glorification that he was wont to enter the houses of Leith by forcing the small window above the outer door.  This artifice, his vanity grumbles, is now common; but he would have all the world understand that it was his own invention, and he murmurs with the pedantry of the convicted criminal that it is now set forth for the better protection of honest citizens.  No less admirable in his own eyes was that other artifice which induced him to conceal such notes as he managed to filch in the collar of his coat.  Thus he eluded the vigilance of the police, which searched its prey in those days with a sorry lack of cunning.  In truth, Haggart’s wits were as nimble as his fingers, and he seldom failed to render a profitable account of his talents.  He beguiled one of his sojourns in gaol by manufacturing tinder wherewith to light the prisoners’ pipes, and it is not astonishing that he won a general popularity.  In Ireland, when the constables would take him for a Scot, he answered in high Tipperary, and saved his skin for a while by a brogue which would not have shamed a modern patriot.  But quick as were his wits, his vanity always outstripped them, and no hero ever bragged of his achievements with a louder effrontery.

     Now all you ramblers in mourning go,
     For the prince of ramblers is lying low,
     And all you maidens that love the game,
     Put on your mourning veils again.

Thus he celebrated his downfall in a ballad that has the true Newgate ring, and verily in his own eyes he was a hero who carried to the scaffold a dauntless spirit unstained by treachery.

He believed himself an adept in all the arts; as a squire of dames he held himself peerless, and he assured the ineffable Combe, who recorded his flippant utterance with a credulous respect, that he had sacrificed hecatombs of innocent virgins to his importunate lust.  Prose and verse trickled with equal facility from his pen, and his biography is a masterpiece.  Written in the pedlar’s French as it was misspoken in the hells of Edinburgh, it is a narrative of uncommon simplicity and directness, marred now and again by such superfluous reflections as are the natural result of thievish sentimentality.  He tells his tale without paraphrase or adornment, and the worthy Writer to the Signet, who prepared the work for the Press, would have asked three times the space to record one-half the adventures.  ’I sunk upon it with my forks and brought it with me’; ’We obtained thirty-three pounds by this affair’—­is there not the stalwart flavour of the epic in these plain, unvarnished sentences?

His other accomplishments are pallid in the light of his brilliant left hand.  Once, at Derry—­he attended a cock-fight, and beguiled an interval by emptying the pockets of a lucky bookmaker.  An expert, who watched the exploit in admiration, could not withhold a compliment.  ’You are the Switcher,’ he exclaimed; ‘some take all, but you leave nothing.’  And it is as the Switcher that Haggart keeps his memory green.