him a thief, whom we may not countenance. In the crowd, for our entertainment? It is wonderful, indeed, as the song says, that "we have not better company-at May it please your Excellency, your thief Tyburn Tree." Exactly like the rest, or rather better; If there is no sacrifice of gentility and public character; if a man is low enough in the world to be hanged without discredit, mere thieving, even in its compound iniquity of crime and penalty, is not regarded with any very serious displeasure. The thief is hanged, to be sure, in deference to our anti-social interests in our watches, snuff-boxes, and pocket-handkerchiefs; but, morally speaking, how are we affected? One of the sprightliest articles I remember in a celebrated Review was on the subject of Botany Bay-and who wonders? See our police reports, with their regular formulary of wit and banter; the jokes on the bench; the facetiousness of counsel, and the general waggery that sparkles on the face of the whole court, where nothing more heinous is in question than a little sleight of hand by which property has changed its owner. One wonders sometimes how the comedy should be wound up into "guilty," -whips, chains, or death. What hearty glee and laughter are always called forth by the representation of the Beggar's Opera-a whole theatre, boxes-pit-galleries, betrayed into one expression of chuckling consciousness, not by the touches of general satire, or innocent playfulness, with which the piece abounds, but by the villainy of the business-the irresistible Filch. This spectacle is too much for our caution; it breaks through all our assumptions of affectation and disguise, and discovers our true kind and class, in the manner that a handful of nuts brought out, in a moment, the inalienable apehood of the monkey-players. The neatness, and suitable drollery, with which poor little Simmons used to whisk away a neighbour's handkerchief was acknowledged-felt, by the whole house. Could not people sit for ever, let me ask, to witness the ravenous thievery of Grimaldi?-Could we ever tire, as long as he would be stealing sasuages The law, in setting up its fences and land-marks, mercifully left us some open ground-a patch of com→ mon here and there, on which we may indulge our free natures without fear or responsibility. In these "liberties," there is no security for our fair conduct but our in-born honesty ; and how does it acquit itself in its office? Tell a winning gamester that he has taken the whole worldly support from some poor wretch, and given him over, with a wife and children, to famine or a jail; appeal to his honesty, you have potent claims; tell him that the man whom he has ruined had no exclusive title to the money which he risked; that, if callous on his own account, he had no right to play away the interests of his wife and children in his property; in short, that he was dishonest in his losses, and that the winner must be equally so in his gains, differing only, as the receiver differs from the thief. "Very afflicting," the gamester will allow, or, more characteristically, "very unlucky"--but will he restore the money?-not a stiver. A gentleman cannot be a horsestealer, for obvious reasons; but may he not sell a horse to an acquaintance, and conceal, or not proclaim, his blemishes? We are very willing at all events to take a warranty, even from "the best nobleman in the land." Stealing books in a friendly familiar way; pocketing carelessly a light pamphlet, or portable poem, is not felony; and what is the consequence? Every man who has a library gives out with angry determinacy, that he never lends a book: he does not wish to be personal; but press him, and he will inform you, that he never in his life lent one that was returned. I have myself lost (lost indeed!) the fifteenth number of the Edinburgh Review, and, with all I can say, I have not a friend who has the candour to come forward and confess the robbery. Stealing other people's thoughts out of books, I just mention, as decidedly of kin to the great family-failing that I am treating of. There is vindictive law, however, for this description of pilfering-the critics !—not over-honest themselves, as witness-their extracts. Law, if it confines our hands, cannot controul our hearts: it may not allow us to be thieves, but it cannot make us honest. Look at the old lady (we all know whom) at the whist-table. What is it that keeps her from sweeping into her own lap every six-pence on the board? Watch her unholy eagerness; her daring equivocations; her "two by honours' always; her flushed and hurrying agitations on the very borders of petty larceny, and say if she is honest:- sincerely, does she despise the thought of six-pences that do not belong to her? The good lady has a horror of Sir Robert Birnie that may not be acknowledged by Bill Soames, but is she more honest? The familiar caution of "Hold up your cards, Sir," is really very little removed in the spirit of its signification from the well-known cry of "Mind your pockets, ladies and gentlemen." A round game, if the truth may be told, is no other, as concerns the minds of the parties, than a general scramble-a "snatch" at the pool-a " go it" for the sweepstakes. People may talk as they please about playing fair, and the rules of the game, but the essence of the sport is precisely fingering. There is no sight more unpleasant than a party of young women at a round game, striving with reddened and fierce faces to make beggars of one another. I have seen a beautiful girl of eighteen rendered positively offensive to look at, by the bravo-like manner with which she would turn up vingt-un. I could have yielded up what money I ever carry, or have to carry, to a regular "stand and deliver,' on Finchley Common, with far less reluctance, than to this Macheath of the card-table. The mistaken creature robbed herself of so much, while she was robbing me, that I could in no way pardon her. For my part, I would sooner see women drinking brandy, than winning half-crowns. If they will play at cards, let it be only "for love," or some such lady-like stake. They should know the interests of their own attractions; yet surely a pretty woman is guilty of a grievous miscalculation, when she wastes her smiles and frowns on a pool at loo. How can an' angel with any face be asking a gentleman, one dying for her perhaps, for change for a pound note, or three six-pences for eighteenpence? The whole business has a detestable taint of meanness, vulga rity, and hard-heartedness, about it. Wax lights and rose-wood tables cannot sanctify such exhibitions :with the Countess behind her cards, and the purple-nosed hag at the fair behind her round-about, 66 one down two down," the little, dirty, narrow, degrading passion is the same. But I am wandering.— I have stated the desire of gratifying our wants to be the soul of dishonesty; and it will be found, I be lieve, that people are honest in proportion to the fewness of their wants. Who is honest? He who has no want that he cannot supply, and no wish that he cannot satisfy. Savages, who want, or procure with difficulty and imperfectly, the first necessaries of life, are thieves by fatality. To tell them to be honest is like telling them not to be hungry. A civilized people then, in a land of abundance, are alone" all honourable men? By no means-for if among them the more imperative necessities of our condition are fully and readily provided for, they have an infinity of superadded wants, the growth of luxury and refinement, that are quite sufficient to preserve our original secretiveness in full life and activity. A man who wants food and clothing, and one who wants a carriage and an opera-box, are equally in the broad way of dishonesty. I speak of dishonesty in relation to pure moral principle: that we keep our fingers in order is nothing; the poor savages will not be behind our politeships in this point of decorum, when it shall please them, on "some fair future day," to set up lawyers, judges, and gibbets. The inequalities that prevail, and must prevail, in civilized society, will not allow our minds to be at rest: there is always something to envy and to want, even for those who have more than they want. A gentleman who can feed fifty mouths, besides his own, at dinner time, might be said to have enough, were it not notorious, that Lord C frequently sits down to a meal with two hundred guests at his table. The baronet is always in a state of temptation till he is a lord; and the lord is any body's man but his own, as long as there is a ribbon or a garter which he does not possess. There is no "highest' amongst men-no pre-eminent resting-place for any one, from whence he can see nothing that is not beneath him. Kings have their competitors, and are as full of wants as paupers. Dishonesty in such high personages is called ambition; but call it what you please, it is the same restless and rapacious greediness, acting according to its station and its opportunities, as influences the meanest amongst us. Kings would be sacking territories and pilfering prerogative, in the same spirit with which beggars would be robbing hen-roosts. It has been justly observed that, as respects manners and moral character, there are many striking points of resemblance between the extreme conditions of human life-between kings and the lowest of their subjects. The parties are alike free from responsibility, the one being too high, and the other too low, to be reached by the checks of custom and public opinion. It proves so, I think, very unequivocally, in the affair of honesty. The whole world, I sincerely believe, is a knave at bottom; but a man distinguished only by a good coat on his back must keep his nature down, and, whatever may be his dreams, must wake and walk as the law directs. Kings and the man of rags alone do as they please: there is no "pining in thought" for them; they leave dreaming to those beneath or above them, and dash gallantly into the field of action, your only fearless depredators. Were I a king-but I forbear;-my modesty faints before so strange an hypothesis. There are wants which seem to be craving and impetuous, in proportion as they are far-fetched and irrelevant, or removed from common feeling and participation. Collectors -those who number among their wants rare prints and pictures, an unique gem, or solitary coin-are thieves to a man. The hankering of the collector is complex, being founded on his regret for what he has not, and for what others have. He would glory in acquiring a Queen Anne's farthing, but would be still sleepless, if he could not take it from Mr. Davies. Bury it-let it not be at all, and he might be content; but that it should be, and for another, is intolerable. Rarities in a national museum create no envy; they belong to nobody: it is in the house of a friend that they become provoking, and drive a man to sin. That it is possible for a virtuoso of common pretensions, so beset and excited, to be strictly honest, I quite deny. Mr. Longfoot has not stolen, I know, and will not, and would not steal, I believe, a Hogarth print in my possession, which is just wanting to make his set complete; but, between friends, let me ask him, if he has not in his heart purloined it a hundred times over. If, as he stood with his eyes fixed upon it last Tuesday, for instance, in a state of abstraction, he was not rioting in the luxury of an hypothetical felony, I am a greater dunce at interpreting a reverie than I should be willing to consider myself. I have myself some virtu about me, and have of course my "confessions" on the subject, if I choose to make them. My collection, as yet, is fairly come by, I believe; but I should be much obliged to Mr. H. if he would not show me that Otho of his any more. Verbum sat. A great city is a perilous school for dishonesty, not only from the relief that it exposes to the naked and hungry, but from the ostentatious enticements to enjoyment with which it meets every whimsical wish and want that can enter the imagination of luxurious man. The gorgeous shops of London, which invent for us half the wants that they supply, are enough to make the best of us tremble for the possible consequences. Where is the person, gentle or simple, that can walk through Oxford-street, and be sensible, within his own bosom, that he is an honest man? The things are all for sale, we know; but what is to become of " poor human nature," with no money in her pocket. at those youngsters who, with slabbering mouths and vindictive eyes, beset the windows of the pastrycooks; observe that shabby oldish gentleman with the green spectacles, dreaming and sighing away half the morning at the outside (he dares not go in) of the curiosity-shop; mark Look 1 that lean thoughtful person (he has not sixpence in the world) handling that precious turbot; and the gailydressed spark, a door or two farther on, pondering over those enthralling cases of rings, seals, and shirt-pins; see how the smart jockey in topboots there stares at, till he almost owns, every Dennett and Tilbury at the coach-makers; and with what a kingly smile that poor-author-likelooking man surveys the phenomena of the cook's shop-he is eating that ham with the glass between them; and then note the women, the crowds, well-dressed and ill-dressed, old and young, who haunt the shops as under a spell; not those who bargain or buy-let them pass-but the far greater multitudes who flutter about the windows and doors, who look, and think, and fancy, and guess, and wonder, and like, and wish, and try, and touch, and-all but take ;-these various persons, innocent as they seem, and as they are in the judgment of the law, what are they before their consciences?-Such indulgences are so habitual to us, and pass through our minds in such easy and rapid succession, that we pay no deep attention to them in their particulars, and suffer ourselves night after night (so graceless do we become) to sleep and forget them. It would be curious, and not uninstructive, were a person, in mercantile phrase, to open a regular account against himself touching such proceedings, so that all his contraband imaginations before shop-windows might be occasionally served up to him in a full and formal bill of lading. A day-book like this, honestly kept (there's the rub again) would be as a looking-glass, in which a man might see his true face, though one which he and his friends might scarcely be willing to own. Any lady thinking herself honest, would be startled, I dare say, at a diary of but a single morning's fraudulence set forth in full amount ;-four dozen Cashmire shawls-twelve gross of straw bonnets one hundred lace caps, and so on, a multitudinous litter of ill-gotten property turned out before her conscience, which might remind her with advantage of those veritable heaps of plunder, that are frequently brought to light in the hands of some practical rogue, and strewed, to the amazement of the world, before the eyes of some inquisitor of the police. The lady, perhaps, sees no ghosts of skeleton-keys, pick-locks, and iron crows, amidst her fancy-pillage, but there the goods are-I stick to that; — and how came they there? Shopping and shop-lifting, I fear, are but too frequently, in a moral sense, convertible terms: the latter has a very bad name, and certainly deserves it, while her hypocrite-sister, who professes "to pay for every thing," looks the world in the face, and meets with reverence. Pay for every thing!I have scen a lady, after poring for two hours over unfurled roods of cambrics, prints, and muslins, till the whole counter was a pile of ruin and disorder before her, finally come to a conclusion for three yards of penny bobbin, and take her leave. If this lady had not more for her money than was honest, I give up the question. Upon the whole, I am clearly of opinion, that a man who has it at heart to be wholly honest, who, while he would scorn to be a thief, would keep his inclinations also. "from picking and stealing," must avoid the haunts of fashionable wants and necessities, fly from cities and all large assemblages of his fellows, and not rest with confidence, till he reaches the mountains of Switzerland or Wales. In these simple regions, where enough to eat is pretty nearly the limit of civilization, he will find the only home of pure, uncoveting honesty. The savage is a cravermeum or tuum-he eats any thing that he can get; but in the condition next above his, where every one is sure of his lawful dinner, and no one has learned any other want,—there, people are by necessity content; there, no one covets what another has not got. Perfect plenty and perfect equality leave no mótive for stealing or wishing: every stomach is full--and for the rest-rocks and waterfalls move no envy, they are yours and mine; the sky has no partialities, it covers us all. This is to be honest on very hard terms, to be sure: it is better, perhaps, to be a bit of a rogue in good company. R. A. THE LITERARY POLICE OFFICE, BOW-STREET. EDWARD HERBERT'S LETTERS TO THE FAMILY OF THE POWELLS. To Russell Powell, Esq. Dogberry. One word, Sir: our Watch, Sir, have, indeed, comprehended some auspicious persons, and we would have them this morning examined before your Worship. Leonato. Take their examination yourself, and bring it me; I am now in great haste, as it may appear unto you. Dogberry. It shall be suffigance. Dogberry. Go, good partner, go; get you to Francis Seacoal: bid him bring his pen and inkhorn to the gaol. We are now to examination these men. Verges. And we must do it wisely. DEAR RUSSELL!-I am much gratified that the Morning Herald, which I now intend to send you daily, gives you so much amusement; the Police Reports are, as you correctly observe, written in a masterly style of humour and truth. Since you have urged me to ascertain the writer, I have left no stone unturned to fulfil your wishes, and I am happy to say, that I now rank that ingenious gentleman among my warmest friends. His name is not Vickery, as you surmise,-I would communicate it to you, but as yet he has not confided it to my keeping. The other day this good gentleman consented to my proposal of accompanying him to one of the Police Offices. Bow-street was our chosen spot. I had told him of my anxious desire to be initiated into all the curious scenes of London; and he assured me that much whimsical work was to be inspected at a metropolitan Police Office. The day we chose for our visit was one of great interest and singularity-and my friend obtained for me a seat at the very foot of Sir Richard Birnie, and under the immediate nose, as I Much Ado about Nothing, Act III. may say, of Mr. Minshull himself. I stayed the whole day, from the opening of the office, even unto the shutting up of the same. And at my particular request, my friend, the Reporter, adjourned in the evening to my chambers in the Albany, and there wrote his report for the Herald, permitting me at the same time to copy it, page by page, as he proceeded; I beg to inclose it to you for your immediate perusal, as the Herald, owing to the debates at the present close of parliament, will not be able to print it for some time. Oh! Russell, read it aloud to the friends of my heart!-You, with your acute remarks and pungent tones, will give the paper all its force and effect. I can vouch for the truth of the statement,—but indeed no one can doubt for a moment that the sketch is one from the very life. My sheet of paper is large, but the report is extensive. I therefore copy it at once, that I may get all into one sheet, and save you that double charge, which is as serious in letters as in guns. Here is the Report. Literary Police, Bow-street. Yesterday the magistrates, Sir Richard Birnie, and Mr. Minshull, were employed the whole of the day in hearing charges preferred against literary offenders. Some of them were pregnant with great public interest; some were unworthy of notice. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, a pedlar by trade, that hawks about shoe-laces and philosophy, was put to the bar, charged with stealing a poney, value 40s. from a Mrs. Foy, of Westmoreland; but as no one was near him at the FEB. 1823. M |