INNKEEPER.
(Skelt.)
Dickens, who wrote Pickwick in 1836, eleven years after Gaieties and Gravities was published, had evidently read Smith's book, for in Chapter XLIII. we find Sam Weller represented as singing to the coachman a condensed and greatly altered version, beginning:
Bold Turpin vunce, on Hounslow Heath
His bold mare Bess bestrode—er;
Ven there he see'd the Bishop's coach
A-coming along the road—er.
That Swiftnicks actually performed the famous ride was generally believed, as elsewhere described in these pages; and unless any later evidence can be adduced to deprive him of the credit, he must continue to enjoy it. But it is curious to note that riding horseback between York and London under exceptional circumstances has often been mentioned. A prominent instance is the wager accepted by John Lepton, esquire to James the First, that he would ride six times between London and York on six consecutive days. Fuller, in his Worthies, tells us all about it. He first set out on May 20th, 1606, from Aldersgate, London, and completed the journey before nightfall, returning the next day; and so on until he had won the wager, "to the great praise of his strength in acting, than to his discretion in undertaking it," says Fuller, with an unwonted sneer.
Turpin was certainly described in his own lifetime as "the noted," "the renowned," "the famous," but those were merely newspaper phrases, and the notability, the renown, or the fame commented upon in to-day's paper is, we are by way of seeing in our own age, the oblivion of next week. The London Magazine, commenting briefly on his execution, styles him a "mean and stupid wretch," and that estimate of him is little likely ever to be revised, although it may readily and justly be amplified by the epithets "brutal" and "cowardly." The brutalities of himself and his associates kept the suburbs of London for a while in terror, but he evidently had made little impression on the mind of Captain Charles Johnson, whose book on The General History of Highwaymen, published in 1742, three years after Turpin's execution, has no mention of him.
Yet, side by side with these facts, we are confronted with the undoubted immediate ballad fame he acquired in the north, of which here are two pitiful specimen verses:
For shooting of a dunghill cock