II—­GENTLEMAN HARRY

‘Damn ye both! stop, or I will blow your brains out!’ Thus it was that Harry Simms greeted his victims, proving in a phrase that the heroic age of the rumpad was no more.  Forgotten the debonair courtesy of Claude Duval!  Forgotten the lightning wit, the swift repartee of the incomparable Hind!  No longer was the hightoby-gloak a ‘gentleman’ of the road; he was a butcher, if not a beggar, on horseback; a braggart without the courage to pull a trigger; a swashbuckler, oblivious of that ancient style which converted the misery of surrender into a privilege.  Yet Harry Simms, the supreme adventurer of his age, was not without distinction; his lithe form and his hard-ridden horse were the common dread of England; his activity was rewarded with a princely treasure; and if his method were lacking in urbanity, the excuse is that he danced not to the brilliant measure of the Cavaliers, but limped to the clumsy fiddle-scraping of the early Georges.

At Eton, where a too-indulgent grandmother had placed him, he ransacked the desks of his school-fellows, and avenged a birching by emptying his master’s pockets.  Wherefore he lost the hope of a polite education, and instead of proceeding with a clerkly dignity to King’s College, in the University of Cambridge, he was ignominiously apprenticed to a breeches-maker.  The one restraint was as irksome as the other, and Harry Simms abandoned the needle, as he had scorned the grammar, to go upon the pad.  Though his early companions were scragged at Tyburn, the light-fingered rascal was indifferent to their fate, and squandering such booty as fell to his share, he bravely ‘turned out’ for more.  Tottenham Court Fair was the theatre of his childish exploits, and there he gained some little skill in the picking of pockets.  But a spell of bad trade brought him to poverty, and he attempted to replenish an empty pocket by the childish expedient of a threatening letter.

The plan was conceived and executed with a futility which ensured an instant capture.  The bungler chose a stranger at haphazard, commanding him, under penalty of death, to lay five guineas upon a gun in Tower Wharf; the guineas were cunningly deposited, and the rascal, caught with his hand upon the booty, was committed to Newgate.  Youth, and the intercession of his grandmother, procured a release, unjustified by the infamous stupidity of the trick.  Its very clumsiness should have sent him over sea; and it is wonderful that from a beginning of so little promise, he should have climbed even the first slopes of greatness.  However, the memory of gaol forced him to a brief interlude of honesty; for a while he wore the pink coat of Colonel Cunningham’s postillion, and presently was promoted to the independence of a hackney coach.