The career of James Maclean, or Maclaine, shows that it was not really difficult to become a "gentleman" highwayman. Born at Monaghan in 1724, he was the second son of Lauchlin Maclaine, a Presbyterian minister, who, although settled in Ireland, was a Scotsman of unmixed Scottish blood, and of undoubted Scottish sympathies. There are plenty of materials for a life of his son James, the highwayman, for the story of his career had a remarkable attraction for all classes of people at the time when he went to die at Tyburn, in 1750; and consequently the "Lives" and "Memoirs" of him are numerous. There are also several portraits of him, most of them showing a distinctly Scottish type of countenance, but not one solving the mystery of his extraordinary fascination for women. Indeed, the full-length portrait of him engraved in Caulfield's Remarkable Characters, in which he is styled "Macleane, the Ladies' Hero," shows a heavy-jowled person, with dull, yet staring fish-like eyes; exactly the kind of person who might be expected to create an unfavourable impression. Perhaps the artist does him an injustice, but none of the several artists and engravers who have handed down to us their respective versions of his features have succeeded in imparting the slightest inkling of good looks to him, and few of the portraits agree with one another. He was tall above the average, as the various prints show; and he wore fine clothes. It was these exceedingly fine feathers, and the fashionable resorts he affected, that gave him the distinction of "gentleman" highwayman; and it is to be feared that his exquisite dress, in larger measure than the quality of his manners, influenced the ladies of 1750, who wept over his fate just as the equally foolish women of 1670 had wept over the hanging of Du Vall.
JAMES MACLAINE.
From a contemporary Portrait.
The Ordinary of Newgate saw nothing remarkable in Maclaine. He speaks of him as "in person of the middle-size, well-limbed, and a sandy complexion, a broad, open countenance pitted with the small-pox, but though he was called the Gentleman Highwayman, and in his dress and equipage very much affected the fine gentleman, yet to a man acquainted with good breeding, and that can distinguish it from impudence and affectation, there was very little in his address or behaviour that could entitle him to the character."
MACLAINE, THE LADIES' HERO.
Archibald, the elder brother of this fashionable hero, was an entirely respected and blameless person, who entered the Church, and was pastor of the English community at The Hague for forty-nine years, from 1747 to 1796.
James, the future knight of the road, was intended by his father for a merchant; but that pious father died when James was eighteen years of age, and so the youthful "perfect master of writing and accompts," as he is styled, instead of proceeding, as intended, to a Scottish merchant in Rotterdam, received a modest inheritance, with which he immediately took himself off to Dublin, where he lost or expended it all inside twelve months, in dissipation, after the example of the Prodigal Son in the Scriptures.