HORNER MEETS HIS MATCH.
This story, afterwards appearing in the Weekly Journal, or British Gazetteer, of December 27th, 1718, and coming to Horner's knowledge, he was almost beside himself with rage, at being so easily tricked. The tale enjoyed a wide circulation, and seems to have impressed other travellers; for when Horner soon afterwards adventured down into the West of England, and stopped a carriage near Honiton, in which was a lady travelling from Exeter to London, he beheld another frantic creature with dishevelled hair, who greeted him as "cousin."
"You hypocritical——!" he roared out; "because I was once bit this way by one of your d—d sex, d'ye think I must always be bit so?"
Saying this he turned over every cushion in the carriage, and found under them sufficient for his trouble: a gold watch, and other valuables and money, in all to the value of some two hundred pounds.
But this was Horner's very last stroke of business. He was taken only two hours later, in attempting to rob two gentlemen, and after a patient trial at Exeter, was hanged there on April 3rd, 1719, aged thirty-two.
WALTER TRACEY
"The adventures of this individual," says Johnson, "are neither of interest nor importance." He then proceeds to recount them at considerable length, sufficiently disproving his own words in the course of his narrative.
Tracey was heir to an estate of £900 annual value, in Norfolk. His father, himself a man of liberal education, wished his son to share the like advantage, and sent him to Oxford, where he hoped he would take a degree and then enter the Church. But Walter was a gay and idle blade; thoughtless and reckless. His character was otherwise gentle, open, and generous: so it will be noted that if his recklessness suited him for the profession of highwayman, his alleged mildness of disposition was distinctly a drawback. At the least of it, he seems to have been singularly unfitted for the Church, and, indeed, had never an opportunity of entering it, for his wild life as a student led to his being expelled from the University.