The travellers who had to give up their valuables were numberless, and many ladies took to carrying secondary purses full of false money, which, with hypocritical tears they handed out on compulsion. There was really not much risk in the business of a highwayman, if a man had a good horse and good nerve. The poor citizens he robbed were not fighting men, and though the penalty of hanging was the award if my well-mannered and gallant gentleman were caught, yet his chances of escape were many. The wonder is not that highwaymen were so numerous, but that, with the cumbersome methods of capturing and dealing with them, any of them were ever caught at all. CHAPTER IX CONTEMPORARY WRITERS The end of the eighteenth century was an age when merit in literature was an Open Sesame to the very best society that the capital could supply. An author who had brought out a work a little above the average was received and fêted, not only by the literary set, who rapidly passed her or him on from one to another, but by the persons of the highest social rank also. London was so much smaller then, that there was not room for all the grades and sets that now run parallel without ever overlapping. When anyone was made welcome they were free of all the best society at once, and the ease with which some people slipped into the position of social lions on the strength of very small performance is little short of wonderful. When Hannah More first visited London, in 1774, she was plunged at once into the society of men of letters, of wit, of learning, and of rank. Her plays, which to our taste are intolerably stiff and dull, were accepted by Garrick, she became his personal friend, and he introduced her to everyone whose acquaintance was worth having. The Garricks’ house became her second home, and she met Bishops by the half dozen, visited the Lord Chamberlain at Apsley House, and was on familiar terms with Sheridan, Johnson, Walpole, Reynolds, and many another whose name is still a household word in England.