BEGGARS EXTRAORDINARY!-PROPOSALS FOR THEIR SUP

PRESSION.

I'm bubbled, I'm bubbled,
Oh, how I am troubled,
Bamboozled and bit!

Beggar's Opera.

Salve Magna parens! All hail to the parent Society for the Suppression of Mendicity!-so far from impugning its merits, I would applaud them to the very echo that should applaud again, always thanking Heaven that it was not established before the days of Homer, Belisarius, and Bampfylde Moore Carew, in which case we should have had three useful fictions the less, and lost three illustrations that have done yeoman's service in pointing many a moral, and tagging as many tales. That I reverence the existing Association, and duly appreciate its benevolent exertions, is best evidenced by my proposal for a Branch or Subsidiary Company, not to interfere with duties already so fully and zealously discharged, but to take cognizance of various classes of sturdy beggars who do not come within the professed range of the original Institution. Mendicity is not confined to the asking of alms in the public streets; it is not the exclusive profession of rags and wretchedness, of the cripple and the crone, but is openly practised by able-bodied and well-dressed vagrants of both sexes, who, eluding the letter of the law while they violate its spirit, call loudly for the interference of some such repressive establishment as that which I am now advocating. When I inform you, Mr. Editor, that I live by my wits, you will at once comprehend the tenuity of my circumstances; and when I hint that I enact the good Samaritan to the best of my slender ability in all such cases as fall within my own observation, you will not wonder that I should wish to provide some sort of amateur Bridewell for such personages as my neighbour Miss Spriggins.

This lady is universally acknowledged to be one of the very best creatures in the world, which is the reason, I suppose, why she never married, there being no instance, out of the records of Dunmow, of any wife of that description. Her unoccupied time and affections followed the usual routine in such cases made and provided, that is to say, she became successively a bird-breeder, a dog-fancier, a blue-stocking, and lastly, the Lady Bountiful, not of our village only, (that I could tolerate,) but of the whole district, in which capacity she constitutes a central depot for all the misfortunes that really happen, and a great many of those that do not. Scarcely a week elapses that she does not call upon me with a heart-rending account of a poor old woman who has lost her cow, a small farmer whose haystack has been burnt down, a shopkeeper whose premises have been robbed of his whole stock, or a widow who has been left with seven small children, the eldest only six years old, and that one a cripple, and the poor mother likely to add to the number in a few weeks; upon which occasions the subscription list is produced, beginning with the name of Sir David Dewlap, the great army contractor, and followed by those of nabobs, bankers, merchants, and brokers, (for I live but a few miles westward of London,) by whom a few pounds of money can no more be missed from their pockets than the same quantity of fat from their sides. My visitant, knowing the state of my purse, is kind enough to point out to my observation that

some have given so low as a half-sovereign; but then she provokingly adds that even Mr. Tag, a brother scribbler in the village, has put his name down for ten shillings, and surely a person of my superior talents Here she smirks, and bows, and leaves off; and, partly in payment for her compliment, partly to prove that I can write twice as well as Mr. Tag, I find it impossible to effect my ransom for less than a sovereign. Thus does this good creature torment me in every possible way; first, by bringing my feelings in contact with all the miseries that have occurred or been trumped up in the whole county; and, secondly, by compelling me to disburseIments which I am conscious I cannot afford. Nor have I even the common consolations of charity, for, feeling that I bestow my money with an ill-will, from false pride or pique, I accuse myself at once of vanity and meanness, of penury and extravagance. This most worthy nuisance and insatiable beggar is the very first person I should recommend to the notice of the proposed society; and I hope they will be quick, or I shall myself be upon her list. I shall be soon suppressed if she is not.

That the clergyman of the parish should put me in spiritual jeopardy whenever he preaches a charity sermon, threatening me with all sorts of cremation if I do not properly contribute to the collection, is a process to which I can submit patiently:-for though his fulminations may be alarming, his is not the power that can enforce them. But I do hold it to be a downright breach of the peace that Sir David Dewlap aforesaid, and Doctor Allbury, should take their station on each side of the church-door, thrusting in one's face a silver plate, in such cases quite as intimidating as a pistol, and exclaiming in looks and actions, if not in words-"Stand and deliver!" The former is the bashaw of the village, whose fiat can influence the reception or exclusion of all those who mix in the better sort of society, while his custom can mar or make half the shopkeepers of the place. The latter is our principal house-proprietor, and really, Mr. Editor, quarter-day comes round so excessively quick, that it is never quite convenient to be out of the good graces of one's landlord. It is precisely on account of the undue influence they can thus exercise, that they undertake this species of legal extortion and robbery, for it deserves no better name. Is it not as bad to put us in mental or financial, as in bodily fear? and is it not a greater offence when practised on the Lord's highway-(the churchyard), than even on the King's? Every farthing thus given, beyond what would otherwise have been bestowed, is so much swindled out of our pockets, or torn from us by intimidation, unless we admit the possibility of compulsory free-will offerings. Í am a Falstaff, and hate to give money, any more than reasons, upon compulsion I submit, indeed, but it is an involuntary acquiescence. The end, I may be told, sanctifies the means: charity covereth a multitude of sins;-true: but undue influence and extortion on the one side, hypocrisy and heart-burning on the other-these are not charity, nor do they hold any affinity with that virtue whose quality is not strained, "but droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven." Does the reader recollect a fine old grizzle-headed Silenus-faced demi-Hercules of a cripple, who, with short crutches, and his limbless trunk on a kind of sledge, used to shovel briskly along the streets of London? Dis

:

daining to ask an alms, this counterpart of the Elgin Theseus would glance downwards at his own mutilated form, and upwards at the perfect one of the passengers, to whom he left it to draw the inference; and if this silent appeal failed to extract even a sympathising look, he would sometimes, in the waywardness of his mighty heart, wish "that the Devil might have them," (as who shall say he will not?) In his paternal pride he had sworn to give a certain sum as a marriage-portion to his daughter; it was nearly accomplished, and he was stumping his painful rounds for its completion, when he was assailed by certain myrmidons as a vagabond, and, after a Nemæan resistance, was laid in durance vile. Was not his an end that might indeed sanctify the means? And shall a man like this be held a beggar by construction, when such symbolic mendicants and typical pickpockets as Sir David Dewlap and Doctor Allbury may hold their plates at our throats, and rob us with impunity? No-if I have any influence with the new Society, one of its earliest acts shall be the commitment of these Corinthian caterers to Bridewell, that they may dance a week's saraband together to the dainty measure of the Tread-Mill.

There is another class of eleemosynaries, who would be indignant at the appellation of Almsmen, since they make an attack upon your purse under the independent profession of Borrowers, while they are most valorous professors also (but most pusillanimous performers) of repayment. If they be gentry of whom one would fairly be quit for ever, I usually follow the Vicar of Wakefield's prescription, who was accustomed to lend a great coat to one, an old horse to a second, a few pounds to a third, and seldom was troubled by their reappearance. If they be indifferent parties, whom one may reasonably hope to fob off with banter and evasion, I quote to them from Shakspeare

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry."

Be they matter-of-fact fellows who apprehend not a joke, I shew them my empty purse, which, heaven knows, is no joke to me, while it is the best of all arguments to them. But be they men of pith and promise, friends whom I well esteem and would long preserve, I refuse them at once, for these are companions whom I cannot afford to lose, and whom a loan would not long allow me to keep. Those who may be cooled by a refusal would have been alienated by an acquiescence. Friendship, to be permanent, must be perfectly independent; for such is the pride of the human heart, that it cannot receive a favour without a feeling of humiliation, and it will almost unconsciously harbour a constant wish to lower the value of the gift by diminishing that of the donor. Ingratitude is an effort to recover our own esteem by getting rid of our esteem for a benefactor; and when once self-love opposes our love of another, it soon vanquishes its adversary. We esteem benefactors as we do tooth-drawers, who have cured us of one pain by inflicting another. For the rich I am laying down no rules; they may afford to lose their friends as well as money, for they can command more of each; we who stand under the frown of Plutus must be economists of both, and it is for the benefit of such classes that I would have the whole brotherhood of mendicants, calling themselves borrowers, sentenced to the House of Correction-not till they had

paid their debts, for that would be equivalent to perpetual imprisonment, but until they had sincerely forgiven their old friends for lending them money, and placed themselves in a situation to acquire new ones by a promise never to borrow any more.

A fourth description of beggars, not less pestilent in their visitations, are the fellows who are constantly coming to beg that you will lend them a book, which they will faithfully return in eight or ten days, for which you may substitute years, and be no nearer to the recovery of your property. It is above that period since some of my friends have begged the second volume of Tom Brown's Works, the first of Bayle's Dictionary, Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, and various others whose absence creates many a "hiatus valde deflendus" in my bookshelves, which, like so many open mouths, cry aloud to heaven against the purloiners of odd volumes and the decimators of sets. Books are a sort of feræ naturæ to these poachers that have "nulla vestigia retrorsum ;" they pretend to have forgotten where they borrowed them, and then claim them as strays and waifs. You may know the number of a man's friends by the vacancies in his library, and if he be one of the best fellows in the world, his shelves will assuredly be empty. Possession is held to be nine points in law, but with friends of this class unlawful possession is the best of all titles, for print obliterates property, meum and tuum cannot be bound up in calf or morocco, and honour and honesty cease to be obligatory in all matters of odd volumes. Beggars of this quality might with great propriety be sent to the counting-houses of the different prisons and penitentiaries, where their literary abilities might be rendered available by employing them as book-keepers, a business in which they have already exhibited so much proficiency. One day for every octavo, two for a quarto, and three for every folio of which they could not give a satisfactory account, would probably be deemed an adequate punishment.

The last species of mendicants whom I should recommend to the new Suppression Society, and whom, judging by my own experience, I should pronounce the most unfortunate and unreasonable of any, are the young and old ladies, from the boarding-school Miss to the Dowager Blue Stocking, who, in the present rage for albums and autographs, ferret out all unfortunate writers, from the great Unknown, whom every body knows, down to the illustrious obscure whom nobody knows, and beg them-just to write a few lines for insertion in their repository. If they will even throw out baits to induce so mere a minnow as myself to nibble at a line, what must they do for the Tritons and Leviathans of literature! Friends, aunts, cousins, neighbours, all are put in requisition, and made successively bearers of the neat morocco-bound begging-book. Surely, Mr. Higginbotham, you will not refuse me when I know you granted the same favour to Miss Barnacles, Miss Scroggs, Mrs. Scribbleton, any many others. Besides it is so easy for you to compose a few stanzas.-Gadzooks! these folks seem to think one can write sense as fast as they talk nonsense-that poetry comes spontaneously to the mouth, as if we were born improvisatori, and could not help ourselves. I believe, however, that few will take the trouble to read that which has not occasioned some trouble to write; and even if their supposition were true, we have the authority of Dr. Johnson for declaring that no one likes to give away

that by which he lives :-"You, Sir," said he, turning to Thrale, "would rather give away money than beer." And to come a begging of such impoverished wits as mine-Corpo di Bacco! it is robbing the Spittal-putting their hands in the poor-box-taking that " which nought enriches them, and makes me poor indeed"-doing their best to create a vacuum, which Nature abhors: and as to assuming that compliance costs nothing, this is the worst mendicity of all, for it is even begging the question. No, Mr. Editor, I cannot recommend to the new Society any extension of indulgence towards offenders of this class. The ladies, old and young, should be condemned to Bridewell, (not that I mean any play upon the word,) there to be dieted upon bread and water until they had completely filled one another's albums with poetry of their own composing; after which process I believe they might be turned loose upon society without danger of their resuming the trade of begging. Other mendicant nuisances occur to me, for whose suppression the proposed Institution would be held responsible; but I have filled my limits for the present, and shall therefore leave them to form the subject of a future communication.

VALKYRIUR SONG*.

THE Sea-King woke from the troubled sleep

Of a vision-haunted night,

And he look'd from his bark o'er the gloomy deep,
And counted the streaks of light;

For the red sun's earliest ray

Was to rouse his bands that day,

To the stormy joy of fight!

But the dreams of rest were still on earth,

And the silent stars on high,

And there waved not the smoke of one cabin-hearth

'Midst the quiet of the sky;

And along the twilight-bay

In their sleep the hamlets lay,

-For they knew not the Norse were nigh!

The Sea-King look'd o'er the tossing wave,

He turn'd to the dusky shore,

And there seem'd, through the arch of a tide-worn cave,
A gleam, as of snow, to pour.
And forth, in watery light,
Moved phantoms, dimly white,
Which the garb of woman wore.

Slowly they moved to the billow-side,

And the forms, as they grew more clear,

Seem'd each on a tall pale steed to ride,

And a cloudy crest to rear,

And to beckon with faint hand

From the dark and rocky strand,

And to point a gleaming spear!

The Valkyriur, the Fatal Sisters, or Choosers of the Slain, in Northern Mythology.