course, the object of all the members of these various associations was to cheat the unwary and charitable. In course of time some of these terms went out of use—the cant of rogues is always on the move—but new ones took their places; and, in spite of all the laws passed against them, beggars continued to flourish. In 1728 a spirited presentment to the Court of King’s Bench was made by the Grand Jury of Middlesex against the unusual swarms of sturdy and clamorous beggars, as well as the many frightful objects exposed in the streets; and, the nuisance not abating, a similar presentment was made in 1741, with the same unsatisfactory result. And as long as there are people who will not, and people who cannot, work, and as long as there are thoughtless people who will indiscriminately give alms, beggars will infest our streets. Referring to such, Sir Richard Phillips, in his ’Morning’s Walk from London to Kew’ (1820), tells us that the passage from Charing Cross to St. James’s Park through Spring Gardens was a favourite haunt of beggars. Says he: ’A blind woman was brought to her post by a little boy, who, carelessly leading her against the step of a door, she gave him a smart box on the ear, and exclaimed, "Damn you, you rascal! can’t you mind what you are about?" and then, leaning her back against the wall, in the same breath she began to chaunt a hymn.’ Even now you may hear a psalm-singing woman, who has hired two or three children to render the show more effective, when these get weary, growl, in a hoarse whisper between her Hallelujahs, ’Sing out, ye devils!’ The Rookery in St. Giles’s, demolished to make room for New Oxford Street, was the very paradise of beggars. They there held an annual carnival, to which Major Hanger on one occasion accompanied George IV., when still Prince of Wales. The chairman, addressing the company, and pointing to the Prince, said: ’I call upon that ’ere gemman with a shirt for a song.’ The Prince got excused on his friend agreeing to sing for him, who then sang a ballad called ’The Beggar’s Wedding; or, the Jovial Crew,’ with great applause. The beggars drank his health, and he and the Prince soon after managed to make good their retreat. Among the most infamous rogues of the last century were men of the Jonathan Wild stamp—_agents provocateurs_, as we should now style them—who not only led people into crime, but shared the proceeds of it with the felons; nay, worse, they got persons who were quite innocent convicted, by perjured witnesses, of crimes which had never been committed. It was practices like these which at last brought Jonathan Wild himself to the scaffold.