often colleague with ruffians to
get up a row during the night, to rob the lodgers, they of course
coming in for a share of the booty. It is true, too, that in a great
many of those houses men and women scorn all restraint, and hate any
thing in the shape of a barrier. As regards cleanliness very little
can be said for any; they all abound, more or less, with those small
creeping things, which are said to be so prolific on the other side of
the Tweed, and in the _dear country_. To delineate, however, the
characters of the different houses, comes not at present within our
limits; that of itself would fill volumes with the most extraordinary
interest; and what then would be the descriptions of the crowds who
frequent such houses--the thousands and tens of thousands who exist in
this country by what is called their wits--whose trade is imposture,
and whose whole life one continued exercise of the intellects? The
flash letter-writer and the crawling supplicant; the pretended
tradesmen, who live luxuriously on the tales of others, and the real
claimant of charity, whose honest shame will hardly allow him to beg
for sufficient to procure the hard comforts of a bed of straw; the
match seller and ballad-singer, whose convenient profession unite the
four lucrative callings of begging, selling, singing, and stealing;
gangs of shipwrecked sailors, or rather, fellows whose iron
constitutions enable them for the sake of sympathy, to endure the most
inclement weather, in almost a state of nudity, and among them only
one perhaps ever heard the roar of the ocean; jugglers, coiners,
tramps (mechanics seeking work), strolling players, with all the
hangers-on of fairs, races, assizes, stable-yards; besides the hosts
of Irish who yearly migrate from sweet Erin to happy England, to beg,
labour, and steal. Here then, is a wide field for speculation, a vast
common in life, where a character may be almost picked up at every
step--mines of vice and misery as yet unexplored. A road that has
never yet been trodden by the man of the pen, and very rarely by him
of the pencil. If a few straggling mendicants, or some solitary
wretch, have occasionally been sketched, the great centre of the sons
of Cain--the outcast's home--has never yet been entered; that place
has remained sacred to the tell-tale eye of each observer. But enough
of this: we will now enter among these new scenes, and in order to
give a correct view of the ways and doings of this stran