He then continues, not very convincingly: "If we have here and there brought in some of these wicked Offenders venting a prophane Oath or curse, which is dash'd" (much is left to the imagination in a ——) "it is to paint them in their proper Colours; whose Words are always so odious, detestable, and foul, that some (as little acquainted with a God as they) would be apt to conclude that Nature spoil'd them in the Making, by setting their Mouths at the wrong end of their Bodies."
Sir John Falstaff strangely comes first in this Valhalla. Who ever, loving the Shakespearian Falstaff, would have expected him to be exalted on this particularly bad eminence, over the heads of the several atrocious murderers Smith does not scruple to include in his pages?
Johnson, Smith's copyist of twenty years later, like his precursor, boggles at no marvellous tale. They knew the temper of their times and worked in accord with it. Why be a critic in an uncritical age?
There were poets before Homer, but by all accounts they were a sorry lot; and there were biographers of highwaymen before Alexander Smith, but for the most part their works are deadly dull. They had excellent materials, but did not know how to handle them. Shakespeare alone, in the scenes on Gad's Hill with Falstaff and Prince Hal and the men in buckram, knew the way, and all London laughed with him at those merry adventures; but such tiresome productions as the Life and Death of Gamaliel Ratsey, published in 1605, continued to appear.
That little work is typical. Gamaliel Ratsey—whether a real or imaginary person I dare not say—appears by this publication to have been "a famous thiefe in England, executed at Bedford the 26 of March last past, 1605." Probably there was a Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman, hanged then and there; but the adventures related of him are almost certainly inventions: well invented, but told without the slightest scintilla of literary merit. Yet this ragbag stuff has figured in reprints of "old English literature." So much the worse, then, for Old English literature, if this be representative; or, more likely so much the worse for the critical ability of those who considered it worth disinterring on those grounds. It is not "literature," and not representative of what old England could then produce in literature; but it is valuable as one of the origins of the highwaymen legends.
Gamaliel Ratsey, according to this publication, was born at Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire, the son of a respected local gentleman, one Richard Ratsey, who held a position in the service of a greater gentleman: an esquire, probably, in the train of a nobleman. His only son, Gamaliel, received a good education, but was of a roving disposition and went over to Ireland and joined the army of occupation there, under the Earl of Essex. He so distinguished himself, early in those operations, that he was made sergeant. Soon after the death of Queen Elizabeth, he returned to England with the Earl of Devonshire, and went home to Market Deeping. At the not far distant town of Spalding he began his filching career, by making use of the good terms he enjoyed with the landlady of an inn to steal a bag containing £40 in gold, which had been entrusted to her keeping by a farmer attending the market. To convince Ratsey how trusted a person she was, she foolishly showed where she had placed the bag; and as soon as her back was turned he had taken it from the cupboard where it lay, and made off.
When the farmer returned and wanted his money, there was the very deuce to pay. He and the landlady went off to the nearest justice and swore an information against Gamaliel, who was arrested and thrown into prison, but not before he had found time to return home and bury the bag in the garden. In confidence he told his mother where it was hid, his mother told his sister, his sister told her husband, her husband told his friends, and so at last the confession reached the ears of the justices. Gamaliel would undoubtedly have been hanged on that occasion, only he broke prison and escaped, clad only in his shirt.
His further adventures with Snell and Shorthose, two companions of like inclination, are in themselves amusing when reduced to less stilted language than that of the Life. Curiously enough, one of these incidents is concerned with the robbing of an actor, whom Ratsey bids deliver his money first, and a scene from Hamlet afterwards. So it was not from any want of acquaintance with the best models that the unnamed author of Ratsey's life failed to put life into his narrative. The incident is treated in as dead and wooden a manner as the rest.
A Cambridge scholar, robbed in similar manner, was bidden deliver a learned thesis. We find almost exactly parallel stories in Smith and Johnson. In those pages it is Sir Josselin (? Joscelin) Denville and his numerous band of robbers, who, meeting a Benedictine monk in a wood, make him preach a sermon in praise of thieving. Captain Dudley, a hundred years or so later, is represented demanding a sermon from a clergyman.
More shadowy even than Robin Hood, is "Thomas Dun." We may be in some reasonable doubt as to the validity of many incidents and biographies in the pages of Smith and Johnson, but there is no possible doubt whatever that the "Life of Thomas Dun" is what one of our own eighteenth-century highwaymen and cutpurses would have called a "flam." There was never a Thomas Dun, highwayman, bandit, and murderer, as depicted in those classic pages; but the fact that he was a myth does not prevent those painstaking authors from presenting us with a very exact narrative of his deeds.