The state of mendicity among the Greeks and Romans is but obscurely recorded, nor have any specific laws or regulations that they might have framed relating to that subject been transmitted to us. The beggars in Horace, who lamented the death of the musician Tigellinus, were probably of the common kind, though some have supposed them to have been fortune-tellers or prophets. Their dress would be of the ragged sort, the _mendicula impluviata_ of Plautus. We learn from Seneca, that the beggars of his time practised every species of imposture, and even amputated their limbs for the purpose of exciting compassion. During the middle ages, we meet with a few legislative acts relating to the vagrant classes. In a capitulary of the Emperor Charlemagne, beggars were prohibited from wandering about the country; and another ancient law of the Franks is cited by Beatus Rhenanus in his German chronicle, by which every city is ordered to maintain its own poor, who are nevertheless to be compelled to manual labour, or otherwise not to be entitled to relief; a vagrant life is also strictly prohibited. For a considerable time the kingdom of France was much infested with a set of itinerant beggars, usually known by the appellation of _Truands_, and their occupation by that of _Truandise_; from which terms our own language has adopted an obvious word of much significance. These people likewise gave name to one of the streets of Paris, called _La Truanderie_; and, under pretence of begging alms, committed the most atrocious crimes and excesses practising every kind of fraud and imposture; so that the name gradually became the representative of every thing that was bad and infamous. In later times they were called _Argotiers_. They assumed the form of a regular government, elected a king, and established a fixed code of laws, and a language peculiar to themselves, constructed probably by some of the debauched and licentious youths who, abandoning their scholastic studies, associated with these vagabonds. The facetious author of a poetical life of the famous French robber Cartouche, has given a very humorous account of the origin of the word _Argot_, which, at the expense of graver etymologists, he derives from the ship Argos; contending that this _jargon_, a term that would perhaps have supplied the real and perverted meaning of the other, was either invented by the navigators of that celebrated vessel, for the purpose of deceiving his majesty of Colchos, or constructed by Agamemnon at Argos, and transported afterwards to Troy, where the Greek generals used it to harangue their soldiers. The same writer has likewise compiled a dictionary of the language in question, which is given at the end of Cartouche's history. Their king assumed the title of the _Great Chosroes_, in imitation of the Persian monarch of that name, and his officers had their several cant denominations contrived with considerable ingenuity. One of these sovereigns thought fit to prefer