Oh, for a glass of max! We've miss'd our booty;
Let me die where I am!" And as the fuel
Of life shrunk in his heart, and thick and sooty
The drops fell from his death-wound, and he drew ill
His breath, he from his swelling throat untied
A kerchief, crying "Give Sal that!"—and died.
But not all travellers went armed, nor were all robbers so timorous. Robberies on Shooter's Hill continued without intermission, and at the very close of 1797—the year in which Burke, the statesman, died, who had some years earlier declared the age of the highwaymen to be past—a rather daring one was committed. It was on the Sunday evening, December 30th, and may be found reported in the Times of January 2nd, 1798. It was about six o'clock when highwaymen stopped a postchaise on Shooter's Hill, in which were two lawyers, named Harrison and Lockhart, and a midshipman of H.M.S. Venerable. They were travelling to London from Sheerness. The highwaymen took the lawyers' purses and watches. "The man on Mr. Harrison's side treated him with much personal violence, by forcing his pistol into his mouth, on opening the chaise-door." The men did not ask the midshipman for money, but took his trunk, containing all his clothes. No one for a moment thought of so foolish a thing as resisting.
But Gad's Hill was the very worst spot on the Dover Road, and had a very bad record for robbery and murders. When Shakespeare made Gad's Hill the scene of that famous highway robbery, when Prince Hal, Falstaff, Poins, and all the rest of them robbed the merchants, the franklins, and the flea-bitten carriers who were journeying from Rochester, he only made it so because of the ill repute the locality already possessed. The place is not romantic to-day, and it is somewhat difficult to realise that here, where Charles Dickens's hideous house of Gad's Hill Place stands, the valorous Falstaff, brave amid so many confederates, bade the travellers stand, and added insult to injury by calling them "gorbellied knaves" and "caterpillars."