Hundreds of wretched persons, the refuse of society, the very dregs of the people, might be seen waiting with frightful eagerness until their fate was decided. The courtesan was there, forgetting for a time her avowed pursuit; the man who the night before had committed some great crime; the pale artisan with his attenuated wife; the girl just verging upon womanhood; the maid-servant, who had procured a holiday to watch her fortune; weary forms and haggard faces, mingling with the more robust and ruffianly aspects,—yet all bearing one peculiarity, that of intense anxiety,—marked the purlieus of the place where the lottery was drawn. The oath which shocked the ear, the act which shocked the eye, the scurrilous language of the boy ripe in mature iniquity, the scream of the child dragged from its rest, to mingle in scenes it could not comprehend, formed a pictorial group which Hogarth alone could have given to posterity, as an evidence of civilization in the nineteenth century. But it has been said, that the mischief was not confined to the poorer classes. Persons of the first consequence entered into insurances for a great amount. Instances are not wanting, in which gentlemen of large landed property, guilty of no other extravagance, lost all their cash, sold their estates, and died in the poor-house. The “Morocco men,” so called from the red morocco pocketbooks which they carried, were remarkable features in the lottery, half a century ago. They began their lives as pigeons, they closed them as rooks. They had lost their own fortunes in their youth, they lost those of others in their age. Generally educated, and of bland manners, a mixture of the gentleman and the debauchee, they easily penetrated into the society they sought to destroy. They were seen in the deepest alleys of Saint Giles, and were met in the fairest scenes of England. In the old hall of the country gentleman, in the mansion of the city merchant, in the butlery of the rural squire, in the homestead of the farmer, among the reapers as they worked on the hill-side, with the peasant as he rested from his daily toil, addressing all with specious promises, and telling lies like truth, was the morocco man found, treading alike the finest and the foulest scenes of society. They whispered temptation to the innocent; they hinted at fraud to the novice; they lured the youthful; they excited the aged; and no place was so pure, and no spot so degraded, but, for love of 7½ per cent., did the morocco man mark it with his pestilential presence. No valley was so lonely, but what it found some victim; no hill so remote, but what it offered some chance; and so enticing were their manners, that their presence was sought, and their appearance welcomed, with all the eagerness of avarice.