MAID OF THE INN.
(Skelt.)
HIGHWAYMEN CAROUSING.
(Skelt.)
Although Ainsworth invented Turpin's Ride to York, he certainly did not invent Black Bess, nor did he conceive the ride as an attempt to establish an alibi; for he shows him hotly pursued by the officers of the law, nearly all the way. In Ainsworth's pages you find no reason why the ride should have been undertaken. I have elsewhere remarked that Ainsworth invented Black Bess, as well as robbed Swiftnicks of the glory of the ride; but a further acquaintance with the literature of the early part of the nineteenth century discloses the curious fact that Horace Smith in 1825, in a volume entitled Gaieties and Gravities, included a story called "Harry Halter," in which that highwayman hero is represented as sitting at the "Wig and Water Spaniel," in Monmouth Street, with his friends of the same persuasion, Ned Noose, and Old Charley Crape, and singing the ballad of
Turpin and the Bishop
Bold Turpin upon Hounslow Heath
His black mare Bess bestrode,