Mr. as, no doubt, she was-hysteric fits being her stock in trade. Beadon, the magistrate, told the prisoner that such impostures had of late become so frequent that it was high time a stop was put to them. Of late? Ever since the invention of cadging. There have been numberless recent instances of the revival of the Cranke system; so much so, that a general crusade has been directed against beggars of all denominations, which very likely will be effective for a time. Here are two or three notable specimens:— John Alexander, a tall man, about twenty-five years of age, who supported himself with the assistance of a stick, and the ankle of whose left foot is crushed, was charged by police-constable 45 H with vagrancy. He seated himself on the ground, opposite Mears' bell-foundry, in the Whitechapel-road, on Sunday morning, when the people were going to church, and he excited sympathy by the exhibition of a large placard containing the following inscription :-" Friends, I have had my ankle broke hand my Bodey Crushed By the railway and is unable too work. May The Allmighty look down on those that Bestoe their Mite on the Poor." The prisoner had been a very successful vagrant for some time. An imposter, named Jordan, was committed for three weeks for a similar offence. He was found in St. Martin's-place, lying on the pavement, upon which he had chalked the words, "I am hungry; I am starving." He had supplies of bread and meat concealed under his coat, and was in the habit of occasionally taking the produce of his silent appeal to the public to some woman who stood near and watched the approach of the police, &c. John Jenkins, an Irishman, was charged by Garrett Dillon, 84 K, with soliciting alms on Sunday morning in Ratcliffe-highway. When he was searched at the station-house no money could be found in his rags, but some time after he was locked up he called to the gaoler of the station, gave him money, and said he wanted a rump steak, toast, and coffee. He was supplied with the two last articles, but was compelled to dispense with the meat, and said it was many a long day since he had gone without his steak or chop. Dillon believed he had secret pockets about his clothes. This tendency to indulge in gridiron delicacies is thus described in a well-written article in the Times, where the statistics of the luxurious beggars are detailed: we find it stated that Upon a particular Saturday evening, it was determined to ascertain how these persons, 250 in number, were employing their time, and the result was as follows:-They were found scattered over 29 lodging houses, 4 public-houses, and 3 eating-houses. The majority were in the lodging-houses. The men were busy with their suppers, which were of the most substantial and comfortable kind, such as beef steaks, eggs and bacon, &c., and they were washing down these eatables with copious draughts of porter. The ladies-the agonised mothers with the two hired infants-were enjoying their tea, which they flavoured with many a relish and many a rasher. Everything was as comfortable as the purest philanthropist could desire. In the eating-houses were 23 beggars refreshing themselves after the toils of the day, with soup, meat, and potatoes. In the public-houses it was still better; 15 professional gentlemen and ladies were there making a night of it with gin and beer, and indulging each other with the recital of the tricks they had practised in the course of the day on the public, with tales of the old gentlemen they had followed in the Park, and of ladies whom they had chased even to their own doorposts in Belgravia. Next day, being Sunday morning, the investigation was pursued in the same district. The revellers of the preceding night were found refreshing themselves with tea and coffee, while an abundance of provisions stood before them in the shape of eggs and bacon, &c. The rogues had even arrived at such a pitch of refinement, that nothing less than "fish," prepared in various savoury fashions, would serve them for a relish. Julia Connolly, no later than three weeks since, rivalled the Francmitons in her skill in dissembling. Her cunning in counterfeiting sickness was so great as to deceive the very turnkeys, who administered brandy-and-water to her in prison, but she was too ill to touch it! "The officer left the cell for a moment, but when he returned there was no brandy-and-water left, the prisoner had suddenly recovered herself so as to quaff the whole (loud laughter)." Three months' hard labour was prescribed as the remedy for this lady's maladies, and she, who at the commencement of the case had been carried into the dock, and supported by the prison female attendants, groaning and gasping for breath in a seemingly piteous manner, on hearing her sentence walked quietly away, all appearance of suffering having vanished. Allusion has been made to forged certificates. These were manufactured by a class of mendicants who had something in them of clerkly skill. They were called Jarkmen, Jark being the cant term for a seal. They practised reading and writing, and were so learned as to be able to speak Latin-thieves' Latin it is to be presumed. Reading, writing, and the higher accomplishments, are not, now-a-days, applied to such trivial purposes as the manufacture of beggars' passes; they fly at higher game, supplying the material on which the begging-letter-writers thrive, and rendering service to those who practise the ductile art of reproducing the counterfeit presentment of the paper-money of the Bank of England. But though the arts were in their infancy in the days of Elizabeth and James, all the lower kinds of villany were rife; but before mention is made of the more social delinquencies, a few characters, whose prototypes yet exist, must be dismissed. In Some female beggars, who were called autem and walking morts (autem being a church and mort a women), pretended to be widows, and wore the attire and assumed the sober habits of those bereaved ones. one sense they were widows, for it would have been no easy matter for the greater part of them to have produced their husbands; and their marriages, when any took place, were performed by the jarkman, their hedge-priest, with a farrago of canting language, which simply implied a convenient arrangement. Such widows as these, with two strapping babies a-piece, hired by the day, are still plentiful on the London pavement. Doxies, too,-the term has since had a wider and coarser application, -abounded. They went about pretending to sell laces and shirt-strings. The number of this class has, certainly, not diminished. The Upright-man (a strange misnomer) held the first rank among the London beggars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is now, however, only to be met with in the country, the police having no sympathy for his "great greatness." "The almes he begges is neither meate nor drinke, but onely mony; if any thing else be offered him, he takes it with disdaine, and (like the blind man Stagg, in Barnaby Rudge) laies it under a hedge for any that come next. They carry the shapes of soldiers, and can talke of the Low Countries, though they never were beyond Dover. The Upright-man is a sturdy, big-boned knave, that never walks but with a short truncheon in his hand, which he calls his Filchman. His voice is not to be controlled." In the quality of voice, the pious beggars of 1849 rival their predecessors, the upright men. The way in which they howl forth their dismal psalmody or narrate their fictitious woes, is enough to arouse the ghost of old Lais, the famous French opera basso, whom Bob Fudge so pleasantly speaks of, and make him crèver de dépit. Sauval gives a good description of these roaring ruffians in characterising the marcandiers. "Ces grands pandards," he says (and what a delightfully-typical word he uses, a word of which Molière was so fond), "ces grands pandards allaient d'ordinaire par les rues, de deux à deux, vétus d'un bon pourpoint et de méchantes chausses, criant qu'ils étaient de bon marchands" (in modern phraseology "respectable tradesmen") "ruinés par les guerres, par le feu, ou semblables accidens." Beggars who hunted in couples, as if they had been man and wife, were called Paillards or Clapperdudgeons. Dekker says that one of these "never goes without a mort at his heeles, whom he calls his wife." He alludes to them in the following extract from a slang song then highly popular. It runs thus Now my kinchin-cove is gone ; In quarrons both for stamp and bone, Dimber Damber fare thee well, This is high praise, though scarce worthy of being translated. As a further example of the rhyming cant of the Clapperdudgeons, these verses, which have a sort of pleasant clink in them, may be quoted. The first line is almost identical with "Oh, Nanny, wilt thou gang me," but the resemblance goes no further. It is a duet; the gentleman sings first O Ben mort wilt thou pad with me, One ben slate shall serve both thee and me, My caster and comission shall serve us both to maund, My bong, my lowre and fambling-cheates shall be at thy command. The lady replies— O Ben Cove that may not be, For thou hast an autem mort whoever that is she; If that she were dead, and bring'd to her long libb, Then would I pad and maund with thee, and wap for thee and fibb. with A degree of delicacy hardly to have been expected from a person of the lady's condition. As the beggars of Paris had their cours des miracles, so the maunders of London enjoyed their houses of refreshment, when, to use a highly descriptive phrase of the time, they were "sorely surbated with hoofing." These were four several barns within a mile of London, which were called after places familiar in the city, as St. Quintin's, the Three Cranes in the Vintry, St. Tibs, and Knapsbury. Further off they had the following houses of call:-The Cross Keys, in Cranford parish; St. Julian's (the patron of trampers), in Thistleworth (Isleworth) parish; House of Pitty, in Northall parish; the King's Barn, near Dartford; and Drawthe-Pudding-out-of-the-Fire, at Harrow-on-the-Hill. That quaintly inscribed hospitium at Rochester, which refuses a night's lodging to "vagabonds and proctors" (a flattering conjunction), was not among the beggars' places of refuge. A few words now upon a class who indulged in ingenious frauds. The begging profession formerly included every description of evil-doer, cheat, cut-purse, burglar, and simple solicitor of alms (if any such there were). In our compassionate legislature we have drawn a line of demarcation, and call the Trimmers and Takers of St. Paul's by the significant names of Swindlers and Sharpers. The trick practised on countrymen, which never seems to grow stale, of assisting the credulous fool to put up his money carefully in his fob, used to be carried out in spirit if not in fact in the time of James the First. It was called "Jack in a Boxe," and consisted in cheating citizens, of whom silver money had been borrowed upon the security of genuine gold pieces, by substituting a false box for a real one at the period when the borrower came with punctual honesty to pay the interest on the sum lent. An adroit transposition, equivalent to the thimble-rig, and that ever-useful ally the cloak, left the hapless citizen to deplore his gullibility and merit the name he afterwards went by of Bleater, the cant term for a sheep, those who practised the art being called Sheepshearers, and the art itself Trimming. 66 Akin to this species of fraud (one by no means worn out yet) was that which was known as Barnard's Law. It was a system of cheating at cards, got up by fellows who dressed themselves like farmers, graziers, and country clowns, whose dialect they would put on with their costume. There were several performers in this mystery. First, the Taker, "he that, by some fine invention, fetcheth in the man whom they desire to draw into gaming." The victim was called the Cosen. Next came the Verser, a fellow more grave in speech and habit, and seems to be a landed man; his part is to second what the Taker begins, and give countenance to the act." The Bernard was the chief player; he used to pretend to be drunk, and have dropped in by chance, knowing nothing of the rest. He would pull out his money and put it up again, bragging of what he had got, and declaring his readiness to risk his all with any man in a game of Mumchance or Decoy. These tricks enticed the unwary Cosen, and by the time the latter was well fleeced, entered the Rutter-a desperado of the Bobadil genus-who contrived to pick a quarrel in the tavern, oaths became high, swords were drawn, a few harmless passes were exchanged, and in the mêlée disappeared Taker, Verser, and Bernard, carrying off the gull's money. Vincent's Law was another kind of cheating at cards, and many more laws there were; the principle of all of which was, that he should take who had the skill to accomplish his ends. 66 There was one kind of knavery which was called Leap-frog, and it was divided into five Jumps. One of these jumps, which has been taken with great effect by modern professors, as many a lodging-house-keeper can bear witness, went by the name of Foole-taking. "Others," says Dekker, are foole-taken by letting chambers to men like serving-men, in the name of such an esquire or such a knight, and bringing in a truncke exceeding heavy and crammed full of brickbats, which is left in the hired chamber and five times the value of it lifted away instead of it. With this jump many maid servants have been over-reached by counterfeit kinsmen, that have brought a cheese or a gammon of bacon to the poore wench, claiming kindred of her whether she will or no." Much more concerning these pleasant (and profitable) rogueries might be recorded, all allied to the beggar's calling; but enough, perhaps, has been said, not only to show the antiquity of the trade, but to make it apparent that a common cause unites the thief and the professional beggar, both being, according to the popular saying, "tarred with the same brush." I therefore dismiss the subject, applying to London generally an apostrophe, which once had a special application,-“Oh Fleete Streete, Fleete Streete!" exclaims an old moralist, "how hast thou been trimd, shaven, and polde by these deere and damnable barbers.” A VISIT TO THE IONIAN ISLANDS IN THE SUMMER OF 1848. THE first object that attracted my attention, when I landed at Corfu, was the governor's palace. It is beautifully situated at the end of a parade-ground, embellished with architectural monuments, and tastefully ornamented with trees and shrubs, whilst it overhangs the sea on the other side. It appeared to me to be a worthy residence for an English peer, and to convey an appropriate idea of the wealth and gentlemanly dignity which we display in our foreign possessions. On proceeding to take a view of the town, I passed some handsome buildings, which I supposed were the dwellings of my countrymen in the civil service of the colony, but a board which caught my eye soon informed me of my error, for it bore the following inscription: "Consulat de la République Française près les Etats Unis des lles Ioniennes.' I gazed at it for some time, being unwilling to believe my senses; but there was no mistake. The French Republic and the United States of the Ionian Islands! Why, what can this mean? What would Lamartine, what would Jonathan say of this? Is not this a British colony, and is not that the English governor's house? I was bewildered. On looking around in utter despair of ever being able to solve the enigma by my own unassisted powers of reasoning, an Edipus presented himself most opportunely in the person of a stout, bald-headed, and rather elderly person, who was standing at the door of one of the wings of the palace. I approached, and accosted him by asking to what purposes the edifice before me was applied. He answered, with an inquisitive look, that I seemed to be a stranger, and his evasive reply, as well as the accent with which it was uttered, sufficiently proved to me that my interlocutor was a Scotchman. He soon confirmed my inference by informing me that he had been a sergeant in the 42nd Royal Highlanders, that his name was Mackenzie, that he had a wife and nine children, that they all lived together in one small room; and he was proceeding to impart to me sundry other interesting little family particulars, when I checked him by repeating my question, and at length with difficulty I succeeded in extracting from him the two primary facts, that I was in front of the garrison library, and that I had the honour of talking to the garrison librarian. He then seemed to be bent on conveying to me an exalted notion of his literary acquirements, by telling me the names of the works contained in the establishment which was entrusted to his care, but I lost my patience, and interrupted the recital of his catalogue by making the abrupt query, "And is this, or is this not, a republic?" He looked at me earnestly for a moment, as if he were in doubt whether or not I was amusing myself at his expense, and having apparently come to the conviction that I was really a bonâ fide fresh arrival, he said, "A republic, sir? Lord bless you, sir, what a question! It is a republic, to be sure, but not such an unpleasant sort of republic as they have made at Paris and at Venice." A republic, and an English governor's palace over the way! I felt humbled and ashamed of my ignorance, but really I could not suc |