was at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally prevailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one would play with him. He was excommunicated; put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that negative punishment which is more grievous than many stripes. Still he persevered. At length he was observed by two of his school-fellows, who were determined to get at the secret, and had traced him one leave-day for that purpose, to enter a large worn-out building such as there exist specimens of in Chancery Lane, which are let out to various scales of pauperism, with open door and a common staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The informers had secured their victim. They had him in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred, and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward (for this happened a little after my time*), with that patient sagacity which tempered all his conduct, determined to investigate the matter before he proceeded to sentence. The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents of (the boy), an honest couple come to decay, whom this seasonable supply had, in all probability, saved from mendicancy; and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old birds! The governors on this occasion, much to their honour, voted a present relief to the family, and presented him with a silver medal.”

CENTURY.

THE lapse of a century has in one respect wrought a great change on London. It may not be more virtuous, but it is certainly more safe. When we read the essays of Steele, Swift, or Goldsmith, we imagine their London, bating some of the ephemeral tricks of fashion, much like our own. Their tastes, sentiments, principles, are all familiar to us. We laugh with them, and are shocked when they are shocked. There are neither full-bottomed wigs nor embroidered fullskirted and cuffed coats in their sentences to remind us wherein they differed from us. We are more familiar with them-are more intimately acquainted with and care more for them-than we do for our honest neighbours next door, whom we know only by sight. But when we turn over the pages of some London newspaper of the middle of last century we feel transported into a city whose customs are as alien to us as those in which the squabbling retainers of the Capulets and

Montagues could only be kept from fighting by all the clubs of all the citizens: Exempli gratia:

"1758, September 11. A gentleman was stopt in Holborn about twelve at night by two footpads, who, on the gentleman's making resistance, shot him dead and then robbed him. Some of the villains have since been apprehended." "1760, February 24. An apothecary in Devonshire Street, near Queen's Square, was one night last month attacked by two ruffians in Red Lion Street, who, presenting fire-arms and menacing him with death if he resisted or cried out, carried him to Black Mary's Hole, when by the light of a lantern perceiving he was not the intended person, they left him there without robbing him. This mysterious transaction has not yet been cleared up, though they are suspected to be the same fellows who lately sent threatening letters to Mr. Nelson, an apothecary in Holborn, and another tradesman."—" 1763, July 23. One Richard Watson, tollman of Mary bone turnpike, was found barbarously murdered in his tollhouse; upon which, and some attempts made on other toll-houses, the trustees of turnpikes have come to a resolution to increase the number of toll-gatherers, and to furnish them with arms, strictly enjoining them at the same time not to keep any money at the toll-bars after eight o'clock at night."-" 1763, October 17. A man was lately robbed and barbarously murdered on the road to Ratcliffe Cross. Finding but twopence in his pocket they first broke one of his arms, then tied a great stone about his neck and threw him into a ditch, having first shot at and mangled his face in a most horrid manner. The unhappy man had, notwithstanding, scrambled out of the ditch into the road, but expired soon after he was found; and two days after another man was found murdered in the Mile End Road."-" 1761, December 31. Murders, robberies, many of them attended with acts of cruelty, and threatening letters, were never perhaps more frequent about this city than during this last month. One highwayman in particular, by the name of the Flying Highwayman, engrosses the conversation of most of the towns within twenty miles of London, as he has occasionally visited all the public roads round the metropolis, and has collected several sums. He rides upon three different horses, a grey, a sorrel, and a black one; the last of which has a bald face, to hide which he generally hangs on a black cat's skin. He has leaped over Colnbrook turnpike a dozen of times within this fortnight, and is now well known by most of the turnpike men on the different roads about town."

There is, it must be owned, something of the excessive emphasis about these paragraphs which betrays quite as much indulgence in a kind of pleasurable excitement of the same kind as is produced by listening to ghost stories—as of fear. The craving for pleasure bordering upon pain, which under the régime of the new police finds vent in glowing pictures of national ruin, was then contented with dread of footpads, highwaymen, and burglars. Still "where there is much smoke there is some fire;" and the terrified writers who declared that of "two footpads" "some" had been arrested, and vowed that murders and robberies had never been more frequent than "during this last month," could at least say for themselves, with some modern novelists, that their tales were "founded on facts." As a witness, an ordinary of Newgate is, on such a subject, with all due deference we say it for his sacred calling, no more suspicione major

than the respectable caterers of paragraphs for the newspapers. A tendency to sharpen a tale in order to point a moral, has been the besetting sin of that class of functionaries as far back as we can trace them. Still, as two tipsy people, who have fast hold of each other, sometimes contrive to keep themselves from falling by reeling in opposite directions, these two rickety kinds of evidence may help to prop each other up. "He stopped," says the reverend gentleman who filled the office in 1726, speaking of one of his impenitents, "the Earl of Harborough during broad daylight in Piccadilly; one of the chairmen pulled out a pole of the chair and knocked down one of the villains, while the Earl came out, drew his sword, and put the rest to flight; but not before they had raised their wounded companion, whom they took off with them." There seems, from the account given of some other rascals by the same grave chronicler, to have been quite as little security within the liberties, as in Westminster or the suburbs:"Their next robbery was at the house of a grocer in Thames Street. The watchman passing by as they were packing up their booty, Bellamy seized him, and obliged him to put out his candle to prevent any alarm being given. Having kept him till they were ready to go off with their plunder, they took him to the side of the Thames, and threatened to throw him in if he would not throw in his lantern and staff. It need not be said that the poor man was obliged to comply with their injunctions."

Custom seems to reconcile men to anything. The insecurity was great of all who, under such circumstances, were obliged to walk abroad at night; and the apprehension evidently still greater. And yet it is most certain that people did walk abroad at night. With the assistance of Boswell, Dr. Johnson has left it on record, that for a good part of his London life he passed nightly unharmed through all these dangers. It is true that the biographer hints at the Doctor's colossal person as a reason why men of only average thews and stature should feel reluctant to attack him. But others, who certainly did not possess the Doctor's physical advantages, were equally daring. The eccentric Charlotte Charke, daughter of Colley Cibber, who, for reasons of which she makes a mystery (probably because that was the only way to lend them weight), chose to go for many years in male attire, acted, about the year 1746, as waiter at a public-house in Marylebone, then separated from London by fields and a thinly-peopled district.—“ In regard to my child," says the auto-biography of this Epicene of the eighteenth century, "I begged not to be obliged to lie in the house, but constantly came to my time, and stayed till about ten or eleven at night; and I have often wondered I have escaped without wounds or blows from the gentlemen of the pad, who are numerous and frequent in their evening patroles through these fields; and my march extended as far as Long Acre, by which means I was obliged to pass through the thickest of them." Nor was this forgetfulness of danger the cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator: for the vagabonds of London in those days did not require a large sum to tempt them to acts of violence-the appearance of poverty was scarcely a protection. The truth is, that the old adage, "familiarity breeds contempt," was applicable even here. The annoyance seems great to us, rendered effeminate by the constant presence of a drilled and organised police, to which we can fly for protection as little masters fly to their nurse or mamma when

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threatened by some member of the juvenile blackguardism of the town; but in those days people were used to it.

So familiar was the contemplation to them, that till about the year 1763 they scarcely seem to have imagined that it was possible to confine the nuisance within narrower limits. In the narrative of the transactions of the gang which stopped the Earl of Harborough we are told :-"The number of atrocious violations of the law which now daily took place alarmed all those who had a regard for order and good government; and the King issued a proclamation for apprehending the offenders, and a pardon was offered to any one who would impeach his accomplices, except Burnworth, who was justly considered as the principal of the gang." The good people of these days seem to have considered that toleration was due to rogues, so long as they did not exceed all bounds-did not do all the mischief they could. As long as they stole or murdered in moderation, a kind of gratitude was felt for their forbearance. But there were limits; and then the friends of "order and good government," and the government itself, set to work, like Billy Lackaday, interrupted in reading his novel by the jangling of every bell in the house, "because they persevered." Even then the note of preparation bespoke more of weakness than energy. Three of Burnworth's associates, arrested in Holland, seem to have been guarded, at a time when the City was in its ordinary state of tranquillity, with as much precaution, and fully more ostentation, as was thought necessary in the case of Thistlewood and his accomplices:-"On the arrival of the vessel which brought them, they were put into another boat opposite the Tower, which was guarded by three other boats, in each of which was a corporal and several soldiers. In this manner they were conducted to Westminster, where they were examined by two magistrates, who committed them to Newgate, to which they were escorted by a party of the foot-guards." The rebel Lords, twenty years later, were scarcely guarded with more jealousy, or excited more the wonder and admiration of the populace. "On the approach of the ensuing assizes for the county of Surrey, they were handcuffed, put into a waggon, and in this manner a party of dragoons conducted them to Kingston. Nothing could equal the insolence of their beha viour on their leaving Newgate. They told the spectators that it would become them to treat gentlemen of their profession with respect, especially as they were going a journey. They likewise said to the dragoons that they expected to be protected from injury on the road; and, during their journey, they behaved with equal indifference and insolence, throwing money among the populace, and diverting themselves by seeing them scramble for it. A boy having picked up a halfpenny, one of a handful which Blewit had thrown among the people, told him that he would keep that halfpenny and have his name engraved on it, as sure as he would be hanged at Kingston, on which Blewit gave him a shilling to pay the expense of engraving, and enjoined him to keep his promise; and it is affirmed that the boy actually did so." We will be bound he did it was an era in his existence-happy if the excitement did not give him a bias in favour of thieves ultimately fatal to his morals!

The most striking feature about these transactions is what must, for want of a better name, be called the absence of "moral decorum." The crowd and the