“Give prosperous voyage to the Mermaid sloop, because I have insured it: and as Thou hast said that the days of the wicked are but short, I trust in Thee that Thou wait not forget Thy promise, as I have purchased an estate in reversion, which will be mine on the death of that profligate young man Sir J. L.”
Such a prayer would seem to argue some mental twist; but strange are the vagaries of the pinchbeck pious.
Two more villains, and we make an end. The first of them was the bold Dick Turpin. Have the achievements of Dick Turpin crossed the ocean? Surely they have, if only in the pages of the “Pickwick Papers,” where Sam Weller sings part of a song written in praise of the highwayman. The verses are generally believed to be by Charles Dickens himself, but that is not so. They are by James or Horace Smith, or both, the authors of the “Rejected Addresses,” and are the two opening stanzas of a long poem. Dick Turpin lived for a time at a house in Hackney Marsh, near a tavern and a cockpit, and passed for a sporting gentleman free with his money. Few highwaymen were so successful as the gallant rider of Black Bess, and very, very few arrived, as he did, at the age of thirty-four before undertaking that drive to Tyburn Tree, which was the concluding act in his profession. Indeed, the grand climacteric for a highwayman seems to have been twenty-four.
The other villain for whom Hackney blushes was a native of Homerton. This was none other than the famous “Jack the Painter,” who formed the bold design of setting fire to all the dockyards in the country. The story of his attempt in Portsmouth Dockyard, and of his failure and trial, forms one of the most singular chapters in the criminal history of the last century. He was executed in 1776, and his body hung in chains on the shore near Portsmouth for a great many years. I have myself conversed with persons who could remember the gibbet of Jack the Painter, and his blackened, tarred remains dangling in chains. But they were old men, and they were seafaring men. And when the mariner grows old his memory lengthens and strengthens and spreads.
XI
ON SPORTS AND PASTIMES
XI
ON SPORTS AND PASTIMES
WE have dwelt so long on the melancholy pictures of the houseless and the starving that there is danger of falling hastily into the conclusion that East London is the favorite residence of Poverty, Misery, and Necessity—those Furies three. We must not think this. East London is, as I have said before, above all things the city of the working-man—the greatest city of the respectable working-man in the whole world. Fortunately he is, for the most part, in good and steady work. Those are not his daughters who march arm in arm down Brook Street, lifting the hymn, which has no words, of irrepressible youth; nor are those his sons who hang about the corners of the streets near the public house; nor has he any connection with the shuffling, ragged outcasts whom we call the submerged.