Highway robbery is a plague nearly extinct.
Mr. Porter mentions (in his work on the
Progress uf the Nation), on the authority of
persons who formerly lived in the environs of
London, that it was their uniform practice
to rendezvous every evening, after the day's
work was over, and proceed to their homes in
a body—especially those whose road lay south
of the Thames, at Dulwich and Norwood—
for mutual protection. A physician, who
resided at Blackheath, and had to cross the
country at all hours of the night, had, at
different times, been obliged to shoot several
robbers, by whom his carriage was attacked.
Highwaymen's horses stood at livery, at the
different stables in town, as openly as the
horses of honest men. Nor was it always easy
to distinguish the one from the other; for
the old amusement of Prince Henry,
practised on Gad's Hill and elsewhere, was not
quite extinct late in the last century.
Respectable tradesmen—reputed respectable
until they were found out—took to the road
after business hours, booted and masked, and
made the lieges stand and deliver in the
manner of professional highwaymen. The
Newgate Calendar is not without instances
of flourishing retailers being taken in the fact
of highway robbery, tried, and hanged.
Pathetic stories were also current in the
magazines of that time respecting decayed
gentlemen robbing from distress; and, on
being expostulated with by their victims,
bursting into tears, telling a piteous tale of
distress, courting corroboration of it by
ushering them into some garret to behold
a dying wife and starving children, and
finally being, not only forgiven, but put into
a good way of life on the spot. This sort
of plague has been thoroughly eradicated.
Happily there are few respectable
shopkeepers who do not now possess money in the
funds, a suburban villa, and a one-horse
carriage. The modern refuge for decayed
gentlemen is employment in one or other of our
great National Red Taperies.

Amateur felony is not of so old a date as
professional thieving. Three hundred years
ago, there was a London thieves' slang,
not unlike the present; and there were
men who maintained schools of vice. There
was "one Woolton, a gentleman born, and
some time a merchant of good credit, but
falling by time into decay." This man kept
an ale-house, at Smart's Key, near
Billingsgate, which, being suppressed, he "reared
up a new trade in life. And in the same
house he procured all the cut-purses
of the city to repair to him. There was a
school-house for young boys to cut purses.
Two devices were hung up: the one was a
pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket
had hi it certain counters, and was hung
about with hawks' bells, and over the top did
hang a little sacristy bell. The purse had
silver in it; and he that could take out a
counter, without any noise, was allowed to be
a public foister; and he that could take out
a piece of silver out of the purse was adjudged
a judicial nipper, according to their terms of
art." A foister being a cutter of pockets; a
nipper, a picker of the same. A lifter was a
robber of shops or chambers; a shaver, a
filcher of cloaks, swords, or spoons, that
might happen to lie unwatched; and a night
burglar was a mylken ken. Mr. Woolton,
who was a professor of thieving, in the year
fifteen hundred and eighty-five, hung mottoes
on his school-room wall, rogues' texts, such as
the following:—

Si spie, si mon spie, foyste, nippe,
Lyfte, shave and spare not.

The writer of a Trip through Town, six
score years ago, tells how, in the parish of
Saint Giles's-in-the-Fields, among other sights
that he saw, was a place called the Infant
Office, where young children stand at livery,
and are let out by the day to the town
mendicants. After some description of the hiring
of boys, girls, and infants at this office, the
writer says that "An ancient matron, who
had the superintendence of the place, held
forth in her arms a pretty poppet of about a
year old, telling her customers there was a
sweet, innocent picture, a moving countenance
that would not fail making a serjeant-at-law
feel for his half-pence." A beggar-woman,
who was vastly in arrear for the hire of
children, was refused credit until she had
paid off the old score, and so forth.

In a form, I trust somewhat abated, this
plague remains, and a thousand small street
rogueries, known to most of our readers, are
as old as those to which we have referred.
Knaves in this country follow the old path of
tradition quite as blindly as right honourable
ministers of state; so that if it were not that
the knaves, through cunning, acquire now
and then a new idea, and that anything of
that nature dawns less frequently upon the
modern statesman, we should be disposed to
say that, evil-intentioned as is the one class,
and good-intentioned as is the other, there is
one way to them both. There used to be
thieves of genius who conceived bold projects
of their own, and achieved great triumphs
over difficulty that appeared insuperable.
The world has also known great statesmen
who could do and dare, and justify their
daring. Now, again, as the noble so are the
ignoble. Few, indeed, escape infection by the
newest of the plagues of London, known as
the Routine. Who does not know how, when
a man catches anywhere the routine
disease, he becomes feeble and wastes to a
shadow of himself, how rapidly he becomes
blotted over, and goes the way of all flesh into
rottenness? Who does not know how dreadfully
infectious this new sickness is ? How it
is communicated by papers and documents,
lurks in the horsehair of stools, and how it
clings to tape (especially to tape of a red
colour) with so much energy that no known