A being of a far different stamp comes next before us; Charles Price, nicknamed Patch, a man who applied talents of no common order to the vilest purposes. He was possessed of courage, penetration, foresight, and presence of mind, and he degraded all these qualities by rendering them subservient to fraud. No man ever was so perfect a master of the art of disguise. Price, who was the son of a clothesman in Monmouth Street, was not out of his boyhood when he began to manifest his skill in cheating. When he was an apprentice, he put on the garb of a gentleman, assumed the name of Bolingbroke, and defrauded his master of a large quantity of goods. So well did he act his part, that his master did not know him, and, when Price returned home, he was ordered to carry the goods to the pretended Mr. Bolingbroke. His dishonest practices were at last detected, and he ran away. For this conduct his father disinherited him. Price was afterwards a valet, and went the tour of Europe with Sir Francis Blake Delaval. While he was at Copenhagen, he wrote a pamphlet in vindication of the unfortunate Queen Matilda. He was subsequently a brewer, a distiller, an inmate of the King’s Bench for having defrauded the revenue, a lottery office keeper, and a gambler in the Alley. His plausible manners gained for him a wife with a considerable fortune, but he soon dissipated the money. About 1780, he began to forge upon the Bank. To detect him was difficult, for he made his own paper, with the proper water-marks, manufactured his own ink, engraved his own plates, and, as far as possible, was his own negotiator. His career, in spite of every effort to arrest it, was continued for six years; in the course of which time he is said to have assumed no less than forty-five disguises; he was by turns thin, corpulent, active, decrepit, blooming with health, and sinking under disease. At last, in 1786, he was committed to Tothill Fields’ Bridewell, where, to escape the shame of a public execution, he put a period to his existence. Numerous instances might be adduced of individuals, gifted with abilities far inferior to those of Price, who have levied contributions to an enormous amount upon the credulity of the public. It must suffice to give a specimen of them:--one was Miss Robertson, of Blackheath, who, by representing herself as having had a large estate bequeathed to her, contrived to make a multitude of egregious dupes; another was an adventurer known as “The Fortunate Youth,” who employed a similar pretence, and was equally successful. A third, whose pretension took a higher flight, must not be forgotten. The late Mrs. Serres, who assumed the title of Princess Olive of Cumberland, and pretended also to be descended from a line of Polish princes, has secured for herself a conspicuous place in the annals of imposture.