Semperque recenti Cade tepebat humus; foribusque adfixa superbis The place about was ever in a plash Of steaming blood; and o'er the insulting door Hung pallid human heads, defaced with dreary gore. He stole some of the cows of Hercules, and dragged them. backwards into his cave to prevent discovery; but the oxen happening to low, the cows answered them; and the demigod, detecting the miscreant in his cave, strangled him after a hard encounter. This is one of the earliest sharping tricks upon record. Autolycus, the son of Mercury (after whom Shakspeare christened his merry rogue in the Winter's Tale), was a thief suitable to the greater airiness of his origin. He is said to have performed tricks which must awake the envy even of horsedealers; for in pretending to return a capital horse which he had stolen, he palmed upon the owners a sorry jade of an ass; which was gravely received by those flats of antiquity. Another time he went still further; for having conveyed away a handsome bride, he sent in exchange an old lady elaborately hideous; yet the husband did not find out the trick till he had got off. Autolycus himself, however, was outwitted by Sisyphus, the son of Eolus. Autolycus was in the habit of stealing his neighbors' cattle, and altering the marks upon them. Among others he stole some from Sisyphus; but notwithstanding his usual precautions, he was astonished to find the latter come and pick out his oxen, as if nothing had happened. He had marked them under the hoof. Autolycus, it seems, had the usual generosity of genius; and was so pleased with this evidence of superior cunning, that some say he gave him in marriage his daughter Anticlea, who was afterwards the wife of Laertes, the father of Ulysses. According to others, however, he only favored him with his daughter's company for a time, a fashion not yet extinct in some primitive countries; and it was a reproach made against Ulysses, that Laertes was only his pretended, and Sisyphus his real father. Sisyphus has the credit of being the greatest knave of antiquity. His famous pun`shment in hell, of being compelled to roll a stone up a hill to all eternity, and seeing it always go down again, is attributed by some to a characteristic trait, which he could not help playing off upon Pluto. It was supposed by the ancients, that a man's ghost wandered in a melancholy manner upon the banks of the Styx, as long as his corpse remained without burial. Sisyphus on his death-bed purposely charged his wife to leave him unburied; and then begged Pluto's permission to go back to earth, on his parole, merely to punish her for so scandalous a neglect. Like the lawyer, however, who contrived to let his hat fall inside the door of heaven, and got St. Peter's permission to step in for it, Sisyphus would not return and so when Pluto had him again, he paid him for the trick with setting him upon this everlasting job. The exploits of Mercury himself, the god of cunning, may be easily imagined to surpass everything achieved by profaner hands. Homer, in the hymn to his honor, has given a delightful account of his prematurity in swindling. He had not been born many hours before he stole Vulcan's tools, Mars' sword, and Jupiter's sceptre. He beat Cupid in a wrestling bout on the same day; and Venus caressing him for his conquest, he returned the embrace by filching away her girdle. He would also have stolen Jupiter's thunderbolts, but was afraid of burning his fingers. On the evening of his birth-day, he drove off the cattle of Admetus, which Apollo was tending. The good. humored god of wit endeavored to frighten him into restoring them; but could not help laughing when, in the midst of his threatenings, he found himself without his quiver. The history of thieves is to be found either in that of romance, or in the details of the history of cities. The latter have not come down to us from the ancient world, with some exceptions in the comic writers, immaterial to our present purpose, and in the loathsome rhetoric of Petronius. The finest thief in old history is the pirate who made that famous answer to Alexander, in which he said that the conqueror was only the mightier thief of the two. The story of the thieving architect in Herodotus we will tell another time. We can call to mind no other thieves in the Greek and Latin writers (always excepting political ones) except some paltry fellows who stole napkins at din ner; and the robbers in Apuleius, the precursors of those in Gil Blas. When we come, however, to the times of the Arabians and of chivalry, they abound in all their glory, both great and small. Who among us does not know by heart the story of the never-to-be-forgotten Forty Thieves, with their treasure in the green wood, their anxious observer, their magical opening of the door, their captain, their concealment in the jar, and the scalding oil, that, as it were, extinguished them groaning, one by one? Have we not all ridden backwards and forwards with them to the wood a hundred times ?-watched them, with fear and trembling, from the tree ?-sown up, blindfolded, the four quarters of the dead body?-and said, "Open Sesame," to every door at school? May we ride with them again and again; or we shall lose our appetite for some of the best things in the world. We pass over those interlopers in our English family, the Danes; as well as Rolla the Norman, and other freebooters, who only wanted less need of robbery, to become respectable conquerors. In fact, they did so, as they got on. We have also no particular worthy to select from among that host of petty chieftains, who availed themselves of their knightly castles and privileges, to commit all sorts of unchivalrous outrages. These are the giants of modern romance; and the Veglios, Malengins, and Pinabellos, of Pulci, Spenser, and Ariosto. They survived in the petty states of Italy a long while; gradu. ally took a less solitary, though hardly less ferocious shape, among the fierce political partisans recorded by Dante; and at length became represented by the men of desperate fortunes, who made such a figure, between the gloomy and the gallant, in Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho. The breaking up of the late kingdom of Italy, with its dependencies, has again revived them in some degree; but not, we believe, in any shape above common robbery. The regular modern thief seems to make his appearance for the first time in the imaginary character of Brunello, as described by Boiardo and Ariosto. He is a fellow that steals every valuable that comes in his way. The way in which he robs Sacripant, king of Circassia, of his horse, has been ridiculed by Cervantes; if indeed he did not rather repeat it with great zest: for his use of the theft is really not such a caricature as in Boiardo and his great follower. While Sancho is sitting lumpishly asleep upon the back of his friend Dapple, Gines de Passamonte, the famous thief, comes and gently withdraws the donkey from under him, leaving the somniculous squire propped upon a saddle with four sticks. His consternation. on waking may be guessed. But in the Italian poets, the Circassian prince has only fallen into a deep meditation, when Brunello draws away his steed. Ariosto appears to have thought this extravagance a hazardous one, though he could not deny himself the pleasure of repeating it; for he has made Sacripant blush, when called upon to testify how the horse was stolen from him. (Orlando Furio., Lib. XXVII., St. 84.) In the Italian Novels and the old French Tales, are a variety of extremely amusing stories of thieves, all most probably founded on fact. We will give a specimen as we go, by way of making this article the completer. A doctor of laws in Bologna had become rich enough, by scraping money together, to indulge himself in a grand silver cup, which he sent home one day to his wife from the goldsmith's. There were two sharping fellows prowling about that day for a particular object; and getting scent of the cup, they laid their heads together, to contrive how they might indulge themselves in it instead. One of them accordingly goes to a fishmonger's, and buys a fine lamprey, which he takes to the doctor's wife, with her husband's compli ments, and he would bring a company of his brother doctors with him to dinner, requesting in the meantime that she would send back the cup by the bearer, as he had forgotten to have his arms engraved upon it. The good lady, happy to obey all these pleasing impulses on the part of master doctor, takes in the fish, and sends out the cup, with equal satisfaction; and sets about getting the dinner ready. The doctor comes home at his usual hour, and finding his dinner so much better than ordinary, asks with an air of wonder, where was the necessity of going to that expense: upon which the wife, putting on an air of wonder in her turn, and proud of possessing the new cup, asks him where are all those brother doctors, whom he said he should bring with him. -יי? "What does the fool mean?" said the testy old gentleman. "Mean!" rejoined the wife-" what does this mean?" pointing to the fish. The doctor looked down with his old eyes at the lamprey. "God knows," said he, "what it means. I am sure I don't know what it means more than any other fish, except that I shall have to pay a pretty sum for every mouthful you eat of it." "Why, it was your own doing, husband," said the wife;" "and you will remember it, perhaps, when you recollect that the same man that brought me the fish, was to take away the cup to have your name engraved upon it." At this the doctor started back, with his eyes as wide open as the fish's, exclaiming, "And you gave it him, did you -"To be sure I did," returned the good housewife. The old doctor here began a passionate speech, which he suddenly broke off; and after stamping up and down the room, and crying out that he was an undone advocate, ran quivering out into the street like one frantic, asking everybody if he had seen a man with a lamprey. The two rogues were walking all this time in the neighborhood; and seeing the doctor set off, in his frantic fit, to the goldsmith's, and knowing that he who brought the lamprey had been well disguis ed, they began to ask one another, in the jollity of their triumph, what need there was for losing a good lamprey, because they had gained a cup. The other therefore went to the doctor's house, and putting on a face of good news, told the wife that the cup was found. "Master doctor," said he, "bade me come and tell you that it was but a joke of your old friend What's-his name." Castellani, I warrant me," said the wife, with a face broad with delight. "The same," returned he :-"master doctor says that Signor Castellani, and the other gentlemen he spoke of, are waiting for you at the Signor's house, where they propose to laugh away the choler they so merrily raised, with a good dinner and wine, and to that end they have sent me for the lamprey.""Take it in God's name," said the good woman; "I am heartily glad to see it go out of the house, and shall follow it myself speed. ily." So saying, she gave him the fine hot fish, with some sauce, between two dishes; and the knave, who felt already round the corner with glee, slid it under his cloak, and made the best of his way to his companion, who lifted up his hands and eyes 166 |