"_Lusus animo debent aliquando dari, Ad cogitandum melior ut red eat sibi_," says Phodrus, and be the poet's apology mine, for I am neither afraid or ashamed to confess myself an admirer of life in all its variegated lights and shadows, deriving my amusement from the great source of knowledge, the study of that eccentric volume--man. The new police act has, in some measure, abated the extent of these nuisances, the low coffee-shops of the metropolis, which were, for the greater part, little better than a rendezvous for thieves of every description, depots both for the ~343~~plunder and the plunderer; where, if an unthinking or profligate victim once entered, he seldom came out without experiencing treatment which operated like a severe lesson, that would leave its moral upon his mind as long as he continued an inhabitant of the terrestrial world. [Illustration: page343] The attempt to describe the party around us baffled even the descriptive powers of old Crony; some few, indeed, were known to the man of the world as reputed sharpers,--fellows who are always to be found lingering about houses of such resort, to catch the inexperienced; when, having sacrificed their victim either by gambling, cheating, or swindling, they divide the profits with the keeper of the house, without whose assistance they could not hope to arrive at the necessary information, or be enabled to continue their frauds with impunity; but, thus protected, they have a ready witness at hand to speak to their character, without the suspicion of his being a confederate in their villany. Here might be seen the woman of pleasure, lost to every sense of her sex's shame, consuming the remaining portion of the night by a wasteful expenditure of her ill-acquired gains upon some abandoned profligate, bearing, indeed, the outward form of man, but presenting a most degrading spectacle--a wretch so lost to all sense of honour and manhood as meanly to subsist on the wages of prostitution. One or two characters I must not omit: observe the fair Cyprian with the ermine tippet, seated on the right of a well-known _billiard sharp_, who made his escape from Dublin for having dived a little too deep into the pockets of his brother emeralders; here he passes for a swell, and has abandoned his former profession for the more honest union of callings, a pimp and playman, in other words, a finished _Greek_. The lady was the _chere amie_ of the unfortunate youth Hayward (designated as the modern Macheath), who suffered an ignominious death. He was betrayed and sold to the ~344~~officers by this very woman, upon whom he had lavished the earnings of his infamy, when endeavouring to secrete himself from the searching eye of justice. The unhappy female on the other side was early in life seduced by the once celebrated Lord B----, by whose title, to his lasting infamy, she is still known: what she might have been, but