quarto with its brightly coloured plates, and
in tracing on the map the course of Mr.
Curning's yacht among the sunny little spots
of the shell-islands.

DEPARTED BEGGARS.

CHARLES LAMB in his day complained of
the decay in the number of beggars in the
metropolis. The decay has now approached
dissolution.

Where are the beggars to whom the
macaronis of George the Fourth's princely and
wasted youth flung the smaller coins, after
Brummell had banned contumeliously the
retention of small " change? " Where are the
weather and brandy-beaten soldiers, redder
or browner than their tattered uniforms, who
asked for alms—" an obolus to Belisarius?"
[A fable, but it ought to have been true.]
Where are the seamen, sturdy as they
were crippled, who, as a matter of choice—
when choice permitted—were for the " town's-
end " for life? and even London town had
then a few straggling and varying indications
of what might be called "ends." Where
is the escaped negro slave, whose back was
marked as with scars from the leathern
and wiry claws of the slave-driver's cat, and
whose body, bowed in mendicant and slave-
like humbleness, was often to be re-marked
for its dull, sable obesity? Where are the
unshorn and ill-linened men who watched
the congregating and departing of classical
schools, and begged, as they thought, classically,
"Miserere mei! Sum pauper egensque;"
or asked those whom they knew, or fancied,
to belong to the French class, "Donnez-moi
un sou, milord; un petit sou; pour l'amour de
Dieu? " Where are the brimstone-tipped
match-sellers who, in the age of tinder-boxes,
introduced their wares and wants in London
suburbs, under cover of some lugubrious
psalm, or solemn " werses for the occasion,"
despite the bidding that it is for the
merry to sing psalms? Where are the
attractive, yet repulsive, deformities who
begged loudly, openly, upbraidingly, of
recusant Christian people, in other days?
Where, I say, are all these long- established
and long-remembered public characters now?
Gone, all gone; as defunct as the box-seat of
the York mail, or as the London street cry,
which heralded the dawn, and in some parts
was heard, like the nightingale, " all the night
long," the cry of " Sa-loop." The New Policeman
walks, with slow and measured steps,
along dismantled or demolished streets, once
the beggar's, the veritable beggar's hotel,
his lavatory, his tiring-room, his harem.
Streets, too, which once rang with mendicant
melody or malediction, are now purged and
live cleanly.

Yet, it is little more than a quarter of a
century ago that the streets were prolific in
the very pith and pride of beggary. The
martial cankers, the remnants of the long
war, and the simulations of the battered
trooper's dress and manners, were bold in
the highways. They had their peculiar
feasts and fun, their favourite viands, their
still more favourite beverages, their own
toasts and their own " cant," their graceless
orgies, and their unbroken slumbers upon
broken floors. Gone, all gone. The beggar
has nightmares now; his blue lettered and
numbered enemy haunts him in his dreams.

The spirit of street mendicity and mendacity
is broken; the genius of beggars' invention
has shrunk into the envelope of ill-worded
begging letters. Where is there now a man
like " the Scotchman," who wore four
waistcoats and three coats, but was shoeless and
hoseless, and had a loose robe, disposed like a
lady's shawl about him, and so artistically,
that he looked " a deplorable object?" And
did he not gain his thirty, or forty, or fifty
shillings a-day by pure begging? What was
a lieutenant's or a captain's half-pay to
that? And did he not, all calm and
unruffled, when interrupted in the exercise of
his profession by a buzzing insect of a beadle,
retire to a public-house, inviting thither
also his interrupter, and consume for dinner
a pound of ham, half-a-pound of less
savoury beef, with a pint of rum, and two pots
of ale?

The strictly professional beggars in those
days, the flourishing beggars until they
relaxed for the night, carried their liquor like
gentlemen, and were grave in the streets as
was Thomson's doctor, "a black abyss of
drink " among the fox-hunters. And had not
the Scotchman a tin case between his shoulders
in which lie kept bank-notes, of genuine
Abraham Newland's mark (for he was his
own banker), and did he not, moreover, enjoy
a pension from Chelsea Hospital? Show me
half so adventurous a pensioner in our dull
days; half so successful a beggar. The present
fraternity are like the men of whom Le Sage
tells, who went to Madrid to see what
o'clock it was, and went away as wise as they
came.

In those days there was actually a man who
posed all civic wisdom. He appeared in man-
of-war attire, and was led by a dog who carried
his master's poor-box in his mouth. This
man put it to the Mansion House, and he put
it to the Guildhall, that it was his dog which
begged, and not he. Then there was a man
with a valuable limp, which he put off when
he retired into domestic life, and stood forth
a first-rate boxer. A Chelsea pensioner
boasted over his cups of his success in
begging, as he stood by his " friend
Devonshire's " wall in Piccadilly, shrinking and
blinded, from the war in Egypt. His pension
was only some ten shillings a-week. One
beggar, who patronised Russell Square, until
it was spoilt by Mr. Croker, did not carry his
liquor like a gentleman, although sedate
enough in his business hours; but he took
his quaffing pints of gin at a draught, and