One point only of the great tradition did Harry Simms remember.
He was never unwilling to restore a trinket made precious by sentiment.Once when he took a gold ring from a gentleman's finger a gentlewoman burst into tears,exclaiming,`There goes your father's ring.'Whereupon Simms threw all his booty into a hat,saying,`For God's sake,take that or anything else you please.'In all other respects he was a bully,with the hesitancy of a coward,rather than the proper rival of Hind or Duval.Apart from the exercise of his trade,he was a very Mohock for brutality.He would illtreat his victims,whenever their drunkenness permitted the freedom,and he had no better gifts for the women who were kind to him than cruelty and neglect.One of his many imprisonments was the result of a monstrous ferocity.`Unluckily in a quarrel,'he tells you gravely,`I ran a crabstick into a woman's eye';and well did he deserve his sojourn in the New Prison.At another time he rewarded the keeper of a coffeehouse,who supported him for six months,by stealing her watch;and,when she grumbled at his insolence,he reflected,with a chuckle,that she could more easily bear the loss of her watch than the loss of her lover.
Even in his gaiety there was an unpleasant spice of greed and truculence.Once,when he was still seen in fashionable company,he went to a masquerade,dressed in a rich Spanish habit,lent him by a Captain in the Guards,and he made so fine a show that he captivated a young and beautiful Cyprian,whom,when she would have treated him with generosity,he did but reward with the loss of all her jewels.
Moreover,he had so small a regard for his craft,that he would spoil his effects by drink or debauchery;and,though a highwayman,he cared so little for style,that he would as lief trick a drunken gamester as face his man on Bagshot Heath or beneath the shade of Epping Forest.You admire not his success,because,like the success of the popular politician,it depended rather upon his dupes than upon his merit.You approve not his raffish exploits in the hells of Covent Garden or Drury Lane.
But you cannot withhold respect from his consistent dandyism,and you are grateful for the record that,engaged in a mean enterprise,he was dressed `in a green velvet frock and a short lac'd waistcoat.'Above all,his picturesque capture at Hockcliffe atones for much stupidity.The resolution,wavering at the wine glass,the last drunken ride from St.Albansthese are inventions in experience,which should make Simms immortal.
And when he sits `by the fireside a good deal chagrined,'he recalls the arrest of a far greater maneven of Cartouche,who was surprised by the soldiers at his bedside stitching a torn pair of breeches.His autobiography,wherein `he relates the truth as a dying man,'seemed excellent in the eyes of Borrow,who loved it so well that he imagined a sentence,ascribed it falsely to Simms,and then rewarded it with extravagant applause.
But Gentleman Harry knew how to tell a simple story,and the book,`all wrote by myself while under sentence of death,'is his best performance.In action he had many faults,for,if he was a highwayman among rakes,he was but a rake among highwaymen.
A PARALLEL
(THE SWITCHER AND GENTLEMAN HARRY)
