Mr. Long then put in his hand, and took out a handful, as much as he could hold; to which Whitney made no sort of objection, but only said, with a laugh: "I thought you would have had more conscience."
Smith tells a long story of how Whitney and his band one day met a well-known preacher, a Mr. Wawen, lecturer at Greenwich Church, and, easing him of his purse, made him preach a sermon on the subject of thieving. A very similar story is told of Sir Gosselin (?Joscelin) Denville and his outlaws, who in the reign of Edward the Second did surprising things all over England, not least among them the waylaying and robbing of a Dominican monk, Bernard Sympson by name, in a wood between Henley-on-Thames and Marlow, and afterwards compelling him to preach a sermon to like effect. Captain Dudley is said to have done the same; and indeed, whether it were the slitting of a weasand ("couper gorge, par ma foy," as Pistol might say), the taking of a purse, or the kissing a pretty woman, the highwaymen of old were all-round experts. But that they should have so insatiable a taste for "firstly, secondly, and thirdly, and then finally, dear brethren," I will not believe. Some ancient traditional highway robber once did so much, no doubt, and the freak has been duly fathered on others of later generations: just as the antique jests at the expense of College dons at Oxford and Cambridge are furbished up anew to fit the present age.
The Reverend Mr. Wawen responded as well as he could manage to Whitney's invitation, and, whether it be genuine or a sheer invention of Alexander Smith's, it is certainly ingenious, and much better reading than that said to have been preached by the Dominican monk, some three hundred and fifty years earlier.
"Gentlemen," began the lecturer from Greenwich church, "my text is THEFT; which, not to be divided into sentences or syllables, being but one word, which itself is only a monosyllable, necessity therefore obliges me to divide it into letters, which I find to be these five, T. H. E. F. T., Theft. Now T, my beloved, is Theological; H is Historical; E is Exegetical; F is Figurative; and T is Tropological.
"Now the theological part of my text is in two portions, firstly, in this world, and secondly, in the world to come. In this world, the effects it works are T, tribulation; H, hatred; E, envy; F, fear; and T, torment. For what greater tribulation can befall a man than to be debarred from sweet liberty, by a close confinement in a nasty prison, which must needs be a perfect representation of the Iron Age, since nothing is heard there but the jingling of shackles, bolts, grates, and keys; these last, my beloved, as large as that put up for a weathercock on St. Peter's steeple in Cornhill.
"However, I must own that you highwaymen may be a sort of Christians whilst under this tribulation, because ye are a kind of martyrs, and suffer really for the truth. Again, ye have the hatred of all honest people, as well as the envy of gaolers if you go under their jurisdiction without money in your pockets. I am sure all of your profession are very sensible that a gaoler expects, not only to distil money out of your irregularities, but also to grow fat by your curses; wherefore his ears are stopped to the cries of others, as God's are to his, and good reason too; for, lay the life of a man in one scale, and his fees in the other, he would lose the first to obtain the second.
"Next, ye are always in as much fear of being apprehended as poor tradesmen in debt are of the Serjeant, who goes muffled like a thief too, and always carries the marks of one, for he steals upon a man cowardly, plucks him by the throat, and makes him stand till he fleeces him. Only the thief is more valiant and the honester man of the two.
"And then, when ye are apprehended, nothing but torment ensues; for when ye are once clapt up in gaol, as I have hinted before, you soon come under the hangman's clutches, and he hangs you up, like so many dogs, for using those scaring words, 'Stand and deliver!'
"The effect which theft works in the world to come is eternal, and there is no helping it. I shall therefore proceed to the historical part of my text, which will prove, from ancient history, that the art of Theft is of some antiquity, inasmuch as that Paris stole Helen, Theseus stole Ariadne, and Jason stole Medea. However, antiquity ought to be no plea for vice, since laws, both Divine and human, forbid base actions, especially theft. For history again informs us that Sciron was thrown headlong into the sea for thieving: Cacus was killed by Hercules: Sisyphus was cut in pieces; Brunellus was hanged for stealing the ring of Angelicus; and the Emperor Frederick the Third condemned all thieves to the galleys.
"The Exegetical part of my text is a sort of commentary on what was first said, when I set forth that your transgressions were a breach of both divine and humane ordinances, which are utterly repugnant to all manner of theft; wherefore, if ye are resolved to pursue these courses still, note, my respect is such to you, although you have robbed me, that if you can but keep yourselves from being ever taken, I'll engage to keep you always from being hanged.