bludgeon that might have served Dandie Dinmont himself. Yet
all these precautions, offensive or defensive, were frequently of no
avail: the gentlemen of the road were still better armed, or more adroit
in handling their weapons. Hounslow Heath on the great western road, and
Finchley Common on the great northern road, were to the wayfarers for
many generations nearly as terrible as the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
"The Cambridge scholars," says Mr. Macaulay, "trembled when they
approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight. Seamen who had just
been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses at
Gadshill, celebrated near a hundred years earlier by the greatest of
poets as the scene of the depredations of Poins and Falstaff." The
terrors of one generation become the sources of romance and amusement to
later times. Four hundred years ago we should have regarded William of
Deloraine as an extremely commonplace and inconvenient personage: he is
now much more interesting than the armour in the Tower, or than a captain
or colonel of the Guards. A century back we should have slept the more
soundly for the knowledge that Jack Sheppard was securely swinging in
chains; but in these piping times of peace his biography has extracted
from the pockets of the public more shillings than the subject of it
himself ever 'nabbed' on the king's highway. It is both interesting and
instructive to observe how directly the material improvements of science
act upon the moral condition of the world. As soon as amended roads
admitted of more rapid movement from place to place, the vocation of the
highway robber was at first rendered difficult, and in the end impossible
to exercise on the greater thoroughfares. Fast horse-coaches were the
first obstacle. Railways have became an insuperable impediment to "life
on the road."

Charles Lamb indited one of his most pleasant essays upon the 'Decay of
Beggars in the Metropolis.' In the rural districts vagrancy and
mendicity still survive, in spite of constabulary forces and petty
sessions. But the mendicity of the nineteenth century presents a very
different spectacle from the mendicity of the seventeenth. The
well-remembered beggar is no longer the guest of the parish-parson; the
king's bedesmen have totally vanished; no one now supplicates for alms
under a corporation-seal; nor is the mendicant regarded as second only to
the packman as the general newsmonger of a nei