Accustomed to live under a strong government, with its well-organised system of police, we in England have a difficulty in comprehending how a regular band of robbers can maintain itself in the midst of a civilised nation.
We know that we have gangs of burglars, and fraternities of thieves, whose sole profession is to plunder. The footpad is not quite extinct; and although he occasionally enacts the rôle of the highwayman, and demands “your money or your life,” neither in dress nor personal appearance is he to be distinguished from the ordinary tradesman, or labourer. More often is he like the latter.
Moreover, he does not bid open defiance to the law. He breaks it in a sneaking, surreptitious fashion; and if by chance he resists its execution, his resistance is inspired by the fear of capture and its consequences—the scaffold, or penitentiary.
This defiance rarely goes further than an attempt to escape from the policeman, with a bull’s-eye in one hand and a truncheon in the other.
The idea of a band of brigands showing fight, not only to a posse of sheriffs’ officers, but to a detachment, perhaps half a regiment, of soldiers—a band armed with swords, carbines, and pistols; costumed and equipped in a style characteristic of their calling—is one, to comprehend which we must fancy ourselves transported to the mountains of Italy, or the rugged ravines of the Spanish sierras. We even wonder at the existence of such a state of things there; and, until very lately, were loth to believe in it. Your London shopkeeper would not credit the stories of travellers being captured, and retained in captivity until ransomed by their friends—or if they had no friends, shot!
Surely the government of the country could rescue them? This was the query usually put by the incredulous.
There is now a clearer understanding of such things. The experience of an humble English artist has established the fact: that the whole power of Italy—backed by that of England—has been compelled to make terms with a robber-chief, and pay him the sum of four thousand pounds for the surrender of his painter-prisoner!
The shopkeeper, as he sits in the theatre pit, or gazes down from the second tier of boxes, will now take a stronger interest in “Fra Diavolo” than he ever did before. He knows that the devil’s brother is a reality, and Mazzaroni something more than a romantic conceit of the author’s imagination.
But there is a robber of still more picturesque style to which the Englishman cannot give his credibility—a bandit not only armed, costumed, and equipped like the Fra Diavolos and Mazzaronis, but who follows his profession on horseback!
And not alone—like the Turpins and Claude Duvals of our own past times—but trooped along with twenty, fifty, and often a hundred of his fellows!