It has been well said, that as the poorest, the most distressed, and the most friendless are those who are compelled to have dealings with, and are exposed to the “tender mercies” of pawnbrokers, it is of the utmost consequence that such men as follow the calling should be honest, correct, and even humane characters. For the sake of honesty it is to be hoped that there are many of this description; but a little, and but a little unhappy experience when urgent necessity may compel the unfortunate to have recourse to shops of this description, will convince the most thoughtless person alive, that there are numbers of heartless, griping, and extortionate scoundrels in that trade, whose conduct and dealings are a disgrace to the most contemptible sharper and swindler alive,—who by every species of fraud, extortion, and oppression, rob, harass, and plunder the poor and the miserable, and add to the distresses of those whose misfortunes have reduced them to have dealings with the detestable harpies. The taking of illegal and excessive interest is comparatively the least important of their delinquencies, though this to the poor and unfortunate is grinding in the extreme, as these knaves in their dealings with those who have neither money nor friends, treat the act of Parliament for the regulation of the Pawnbroking trade as a mere dead letter. The substitution of articles of inferior description for such as are of a greater value,—the taking off the gold hands and removing the interior works of watches, and replacing them with others which resemble them, of base metal or inferior value,—and the scraping or diminishing articles of plate and the cases of watches, are well known to those whose wants or emergencies compel them to send their property on its travels up the spout of the pop-shop. And through the defect of the law, and as the poet Crabbe says, “the protection of a drowsy bench,” sufferers but rarely obtain any redress. A periodical writer, in expressing his abhorrence of the frauds of these vermin, recommends the sufferers to lay “incessant informations against the malpractices of these villains.” But had that kind-hearted man been acquainted with the fact that informations have been repeatedly laid, and have always miscarried, and will always miscarry while the law remains in its defective state, he would, no doubt, have recommended a petition to Parliament, praying to subject the infamous impostors to the punishment of transportation for their audacious and daily frauds and swindlings practised “on the children of sorrow and the heirs of unnumbered woes and wants.” The fate of informations has been fully proved in the numerous instances in which a scoundrel in the neighbourhood of Snow Hill has defeated the purposes of justice by the contemptible quibbles, evasions, and subterfuges resorted to by his attorney in all cases in which he has been summoned before the magistrates at Guildhall,