Dick Turpin, although his name bulks so largely in the legendary story of the roads, was by no means the foremost of his profession. He was brutal, and lacked the finer instincts of the artist. It could never, for instance, have been in his nature to invite the wife of a traveller he had just robbed to dance a coranto with him on the Common, as Duval did on Hounslow Heath when the distant clocks were sounding the hour of midnight. With Turpin it was an oath and a blow. Curses and violence, not courtesy, were his methods. Therefore, it is with the less compunction that we may tear away the romance from Richard Turpin and say that, so far from being the hero of the Ride to York, he never rode to York at all, except on that fatal morning when he progressed to York Castle in chains, presently to be convicted and hanged for the unromantic crimes of horse, sheep, and cattle stealing. He was little better than a vulgar burglar and horse-thief. It was Harrison Ainsworth who made Turpin a hero from such very unpromising material, and he, in fact, invented not only the ride to York, but Black Bess as well. According to the novelist, Turpin started from Kilburn, and came into the Great North Road at Highgate, with three mounted officers after him. Thence he turned into Hornsey, and so by the Ware route, the mare clearing the twelve feet high toll-gate on the way without an effort. They always do that in fiction, but the animal that could do it in fact does not exist. At Tottenham (always according to the novelist, of course) the people threw brickbats at the gallant Turpin. They “showered thick as hail, and quite as harmlessly, around him,” and Turpin laughed, as, indeed, he had an occasion to do, because the Tottenham people must have been the poorest of marksmen. And so pursuers and pursued swept through Edmonton and Ware, and quite a number of places which are not on our route. At Alconbury Hill he comes into view again, and the inconceivable chase proceeds until Black Bess expires, at sunrise, within sight of the glorious panorama of York’s spires and towers. There are very many who believe Ainsworth’s long rigmarole, and take their ideas of that unromantic highwayman from his novel, but the dashing, highsouled (and at times maudlin) fellow of those pages is absolutely fictitious. IV AINSWORTH constructed his fictitious hero from a very slight basis of fact. What a pity he did not rear his narrative on better lines, and give the credit of the Ride to York to the man who really did it. For it was done, and it was a longer ride by some twenty-six miles, at least, than that recounted in the vulgar romance of _Rookwood_. It was, in fact, a better ride, by a better man, and at a much earlier period.