Nicholas Horner was a younger son of the vicar of Honiton, in Devonshire, and was born in 1687. He was wild and unmanageable almost from infancy, and showed little promise of remaining in the humble post of attorney's clerk, in which his father placed him, in London, when he was seventeen or eighteen years of age. He remained, however, with the attorney for three years, learning more in the way of drinking and dicing at the "Devil" and the "Apollo" taverns in the Strand, than of law in Clement's Inn. He then ran away, and remarked when he exchanged his quill-pen, his parchments, and his stool in the lawyer's office, for the pistols, the crape mask, and the mettlesome horse of the highwayman, that he was only exchanging one branch of the profession to which he had been articled for another and a higher—becoming a "highway lawyer," a "conveyancer" and a "collector." Unfortunately for him, he began to practise in this new branch before he had properly made himself acquainted with the rudiments of its procedure, and was in consequence taken in an interview with his first client, and lodged in Winchester gaol, where he remained for three months before his trial came on. In the meanwhile, the friends of his family, seeing how scandalous a thing it would be if a clergyman's son were convicted of highway robbery, and sentenced to die by the rope of the hangman, strongly endeavoured to persuade the gentleman whom he had robbed to fail in identifying him. But their efforts were fruitless, for he was determined to prosecute, and the trial in due course was held, and the prisoner found guilty and formally sentenced to death.

His friends were more successful in the petitions they forwarded to the Queen, herself an excellent Churchwoman, and disposed to stretch a point that its ministers might be saved from unmerited reproach. Horner was pardoned on condition that his friends undertook that he should be sent out of the kingdom within three months, and that they should undertake to keep him in exile for seven years. It was an excellent offer, and they accepted, shipping him to India, where he remained for the stipulated time, passing through many adventures which, although detailed by Smith, are not concerned with the highway portion of his career, and are not even remotely credible.

Returning to his native shores, he found both his father and mother dead, and received from the executors of his father's will the amount of £500, all his father had to leave him. That sum did not last him long. What are described as "the pleasures of town" soon brought him again to his last guinea; and he, of course, once more took to the road.

"Well overtaken, friend," he said to a farmer he came up with on the road. "Methinks you look melancholy; pray what ails you, sir? If you are under any afflictions and crosses in the world, perhaps I may help to relieve them."

"Ah! my dear sir," replied the farmer, "were I to say I had any losses, I should lie, for I have been a thriving man all my life, and want for nothing; but indeed I have crosses enough, for I have a d—d scolding wife at home, who, though I am the best of husbands to her, and daily do my best to make her and my children happy, is always raving and scolding about the house like a madwoman. I am daily almost nagged out of my life. If there be such a thing as perpetual motion, as some scientific men say, I'm sure it is in my wife's tongue, for it never lies still, from morning to night. Scolding is so habitual to her that she even scolds in her sleep. If any man could tell me how to remedy it, I have a hundred pounds in gold and silver about me which I would give him with all my heart, for so great a benefit which I should receive by the taming of this confounded shrew."

Horner, listening to this most pleasant tune of a hundred pounds, said: "Sir, I'll just tell the ingredients with which nature first formed a scold, and thus, the cause of the distemper being known, it will be easier to effect a cure. You must understand, then, that nature, in making a scold, first took of the tongues and galls of bulls, bears, wolves, magpies, parrots, cuckoos, and nightingales, of each a like number; the tongues and tails of vipers, adders, snails, and lizards, six each; aurum fulminans, aqua fortis, and gunpowder, of each a pound; the clappers of seventeen bells, and the pestles of thirty apothecaries' mortars, which becoming all mixed, she calcined them in Mount Stromboli and dissolved the ashes in water, distilled just under London Bridge at three-quarters flow-tide, and filtered through the leaves of Calepin's dictionary, to render the operation more verbal; after which she distilled it again through a speaking-trumpet, and closed up the remaining spirits in the mouth of a cannon. Then she opened the graves of all recently-deceased pettifoggers, mountebanks, barbers, coffeemen, newsmongers, and fishwives at Billingsgate, and with the skin of their tongues made a bladder, covered over with drumheads and filled with storms, tempests, whirlwinds, thunder and lightning. Lastly, to irradiate the whole elixir, and make it more churlish, she cut a vein under the tongue of the dog-star, drawing thence a pound of the most choleric blood; and from which sublimating the spirits, she mixed them with the foam of a mad dog; and then, putting all together in the before-mentioned bladder, stitched it up with the nerves of Socrates' wife."

"A damned compound, indeed." said the farmer; "and surely it must be impossible for any man to tame a shrew at this rate."

"Not at all," replied Horner, "for when she first begins to be in her fits, you shall perceive it by the bending of her brows; then apply to her a plaster of good words: after that, give her a wheedling potion; and if that will not do, take a bull's tail, and, applying the same with a strong arm from shoulder to flank, it shall infallibly complete the cure."

The farmer was very well pleased with this prescription, and, giving Horner many thanks and treating him liberally at the next inn, they continued to ride on together. At last, coming to a convenient place, Horner said, "Please pay me now, sir, for my advice."

"I thought the entertainment I provided for you just now at the inn was all the satisfaction you required," retorted the surprised farmer.

"No, sir," said Horner, "you promised a hundred pounds if any one would find you a remedy for your scolding wife; and a bargain is a bargain all the world over, in the market or on the road": so presenting his pistol at the farmer's head, "d—n me, sir," he continued, "presently deliver your bag, or you are a dead man!"

The farmer delivered the bag, which, if it did not contain quite a hundred pounds, formed an excellent recompense for the time Horner had spent in exercising his fantastic imagination upon him.

Shortly after this exploit, Horner met a gentleman on Hounslow Heath, saluting him with the customary demand to hand over his dibs.

The traveller gave him six guineas, all he had, saying: "Sir, you love money better than I do, to thus venture your neck for it"; to which Horner rejoined, "I follow the way of the world, sir, which now prefers money before friends, or honesty; yea, some before the salvation of their souls; for it is the love of money that makes the unjust judge take a bribe, the corrupt lawyer to plead an evil cause: the physician to kill a man without fear of hanging, and the surgeon to prolong a cure. 'Tis this that makes the tradesman tell a lie in selling his wares; the butcher to blow his veal; the tailor to covet so much cabbage; the miller to cheat in his corn-grinding; the baker to give short weight, and to wear a wooden cravat for it; the shoemaker to stretch his leather, as he does his conscience: and the gentlemen of the pad—such as myself—to wear a Tyburn tippet, or old Storey's cap on some country gallows. So good-day to you, sir, and thank you, and never despise money in a naughty world."

Horner now experienced a sad blow to his self-esteem, in an adventure in which he was made to play a ridiculous part, and to be the butt afterwards of his acquaintances. A lady of considerable position and wealth was travelling from Colchester to London by stage-coach, and happened to be the only passenger for a considerable distance. At Braintree the coachman very politely warned her that, if she had anything of value about her, she had better conceal it, for there were several gay sparks about the neighbouring heath, whom he thought to be highwaymen. Thanking him, the lady placed her gold watch, a purse full of guineas and some valuable lace under the seat; and then disarranged her hair, like poor Ophelia, to act the part of a lunatic.

Presently, Horner rode up to the coach, presented a pistol, and demanded her money. Instantly she opened the coach-door, leapt out, and taking the highwayman by the leg, cried in a very piteous voice, "Oh, dear cousin Tom, I am glad to see you. I hope you'll now rescue me from this rogue of a coachman, for he's carrying me, by my rogue of a husband's orders, to Bedlam, for a mad woman."

"D—n me," replied Horner, "I'm none of your cousin. I don't know you, but you must be mad, and Bedlam is the best place for you."

"Oh! cousin Tom," said she, clinging to him, "but I will go with you, not to Bedlam."

"Do you know this mad creature?" asked the now distracted highwayman of the coachman.

"Yes," he replied, entering into the spirit of the thing; "I know the lady very well. I am now going, by her husband's orders, to London, to put her in a madhouse, but not into Bedlam, as she supposes."

"Take her, then," exclaimed Horner, "even if it were to the devil." So saying, he set spurs to his horse, and made off as fast as he could, for fear of her continuing to claim cousinship with him.

This story, afterwards appearing in the Weekly Journal, or British Gazetteer, of December 27th, 1718, and coming to Horner's knowledge, he was almost beside himself with rage, at being so easily tricked. The tale enjoyed a wide circulation, and seems to have impressed other travellers; for when Horner soon afterwards adventured down into the West of England, and stopped a carriage near Honiton, in which was a lady travelling from Exeter to London, he beheld another frantic creature with dishevelled hair, who greeted him as "cousin."

"You hypocritical——!" he roared out; "because I was once bit this way by one of your d—d sex, d'ye think I must always be bit so?"

Saying this he turned over every cushion in the carriage, and found under them sufficient for his trouble: a gold watch, and other valuables and money, in all to the value of some two hundred pounds.

But this was Horner's very last stroke of business. He was taken only two hours later, in attempting to rob two gentlemen, and after a patient trial at Exeter, was hanged there on April 3rd, 1719, aged thirty-two.