Her story indelibly associates the author with Hampstead, where, indeed, the smooth-faced, precise, placid-looking little man might often be seen in retired corners of the pump-house or Long Room, or sidling behind the trees in the walks, or propped upon his stick, his favourite attitude, ‘one hand in his bosom, and the other supporting his chin.’ The year in which ‘Clarissa’ appeared was that in which Johnson, in spite of his poverty, had taken lodgings for the exacting Tetty in that ‘little house beyond the church,’ and was hard at work upon the ‘Vanity of Human Wishes,’ possibly to provide the means of paying for them. In this year—the ‘Clarissa’ year—the inhabitants of Hampstead being ‘very desirous to prevent any robberies or felonies being committed in the said parish,’ had joined with those of Hackney, Clapham, and probably other outlying suburbs, and subscribed amongst themselves to a common fund, which enabled them to offer a reward of ‘ten pounds to any person or persons who shall apprehend or take any highwayman or footpad, who shall commit any robbery within the said parish.’[267] Similar announcements, differing in no way but in the name of the place, appeared almost simultaneously in the columns of the _Daily Advertiser_ in the month of June, 1748. As early as 1736 the gentlemen of Hackney, then a beautiful subrural village, much affected by rich City men and merchants, had agreed to have ‘a good and substantial watch to patrol the footway between London and Hackney, from six at night till ten, all armed with halberts’; and years previously the turnpike men had provided themselves with long speaking-trumpets, that upon the first notice of a robbery they might alarm the distant villages, and enable the inhabitants to pursue the robbers. It was this state of social terror that roused the householders from time to time to band themselves together, and, armed with blunderbusses and cutlasses, to patrol the roads in the neighbourhood of their homes for mutual protection. Evidently a lawless time, with only one remedy, the gibbet, which an appearance before Sir John de Veil, or other Bow Street justice, was almost certain to be the prelude to. The laws of England were draconic, the quality of mercy unknown. All gradations of crime were condemned together, and convicts came out by cart-fulls to Tyburn, where the cruel, stealthy, midnight murderer, and the pitiful thief who had filched a sixpence from a farmer’s boy,[268] came to the same end, and were hanged. ‘The death penalty,’ says Horace Walpole, ‘was as frequent as curses in the Commination Service.’