The Bible and the Newgate Calendarthese twain were George Borrow's favourite reading,and all save the psychologist and the pedant will applaud the preference.For the annals of the `family'are distinguished by an epic severity,a fearless directness of speech,which you will hardly match outside the Iliad or the Chronicles of the Kings.But the Newgate Calendar did not spring readymade into being:it is the result of a curious and gradual development.The chapbooks came first,with their bold type,their coarse paper,and their clumsy,characteristic woodcutsthe chapbooks,which none can contemplate without an enchanted sentiment.Here at last you come upon a literature,which has been read to pieces.The very rarity of the slim,rough volumes,proves that they have been handed from one greedy reader to another,until the great libraries alone are rich enough to harbour them.They do not boast the careful elegance of a famous press:many of them came from the printingoffice of a country town:yet the least has a simplicity and concision,which are unknown in this age of popular fiction.Even their lack of invention is admirable:as the same woodcut might be used to represent Guy,Earl of Warwick,or the last highwayman who suffered at Tyburn,so the same enterprise is ascribed with a delightful ingenuousness to all the heroes who rode abroad under the stars to fill their pockets.
The Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey delighted England in 1605,and was the example of after ages.The anecdote of the road was already crystallised,and henceforth the robber was unable to act contrary to the will of the chapbook.Thus there grew up a folklore of thievery:the very insistence upon the same motive suggests the fairytale,and,as in the legends of every country,there is an identical element which the anthropologists call `human';so in the annals of adventure there is a set of invariable incidents,which are the essence of thievery.The industrious hacks,to whom we owe the entertainment of the chapbooks,being seedy parsons or lawyers'clerks,were conscious of their literary deficiencies:they preferred to obey tradition rather than to invent ineptitudes.
So you may trace the same jest,the same intrigue through the unnumbered lives of three centuries.And if,being a philosopher,you neglect the obvious plagiarism,you may induce from these similarities a cunning theory concerning the uniformity of the human brain.But the easier explanation is,as always,the more satisfactory;and there is little doubt that in versatility the thief surpassed his historian.
Had the chapbooks still been scattered in disregarded corners,they would have been unknown or misunderstood.Happily,a man of genius came in the nick to convert them into as vivid and sparkling a piece of literature as the time could show.This was Captain Alexander Smith,whose Lives of the Highwaymen,published in 1719,was properly described by its author as `the first impartial piece of this nature which ever appeared in English.'Now,Captain Smith inherited from a nameless father no other patrimony than a fierce loyalty to the Stuarts,and the sanguine temperament which views in horror a wellordered life.
Though a mere foundling,he managed to acquire the rudiments,and he was not wholly unlettered when at eighteen he took to the road.His courage,fortified by an intimate knowledge of the great tradition,was rewarded by an immediate success,and he rapidly became the master of so much leisure as enabled him to pursue his studies with pleasure and distinction.When his companions damned him for a milksop,he was loftily contemptuous,conscious that it was not in intelligence alone that he was their superior.While the Stuarts were the gods of his idolatry,while the Regicides were the fiends of his frank abhorrence,it was from the Elizabethans that he caught the splendid vigour of his style;and he owed not only his historical sense,but his living English to the example of Philemon Holland.Moreover,it is to his constant glory that,living at a time that preferred as well to attenuate the English tongue as to degrade the profession of the highway,he not only rode abroad with a fearless courtesy,but handled his own language with the force and spirit of an earlier age.
He wrote with the authority of courage and experience.Ahazardous career had driven envy and malice from his dauntless breast.Though he confesses a debt to certain `learned and eminent divines of the Church of England,'he owed a greater debt to his own observation,and he knewnone betterhow to recognise with enthusiasm those deeds of daring which only himself has rivalled.A master of etiquette,he distributed approval and censure with impartial hand;and he was quick to condemn the smallest infraction of an ancient law.Nor was he insensible to the dignity of history.The best models were always before him.With admirable zeal he studied the manner of such masters as Thucydides and Titus Livius of Padua.Above all,he realised the importance of setting appropriate speeches in the mouths of his characters;and,permitting his heroes to speak for themselves,he imparted to his work an irresistible air of reality and good faith.His style,always studied,was neither too low nor too high for his subject.An illbalanced sentence was as hateful to him as a foul thrust or a stolen advantage.
Abroad a craftsman,he carried into the closet the skill and energy which distinguished him when the moon was on the heath.
Though not born to the arts of peace,he was determined to prove his respect for letters,and his masterpiece is no less pompous in manner than it is estimable in tone and sound in reflection.
