The swindler should not at the present day hope to take the Philistines by the strength of his hair. No; let him shave, and put the barest face upon the dignity of his profession—it cannot be _too_ bare. CHAPTER IV OF THE PARENTAGE AND NAME OF A SWINDLER—OF HIS EQUIPAGE—OF HIS MORAL PHILOSOPHY THE professor of our distinguished art has, it must be conceded, this peculiar and most grateful advantage—he may choose his ancestors. With the _Peerage_ or the _Red Book_ open before him, it lies within his own breast to decide whether he shall have come from the loins of a Norman baron—of one of the boldest of that invincible band of marauders and thieves who jumped on Hastings beach—or whether he shall be the last of a collateral branch of the Strozzi, or Frangepani, or of any other Italian house whose beginning, in the opinion of divers heralds, dates from beyond Numa. Here is a glorious prerogative! The swindler may make his own coat-of-arms, although his immediate father walked the earth without a shirt. Show me any other man possessing so delicious a privilege. With long rolls of knights and barons, and earls and princes before him, how the swindler may play the epicure with the mighty dead! How loftily, yet how serenely, may he contemplate the titled dust of bygone generations! Even as your dainty snuff-taker coquets with a dozen samples of the odoriferous tobacco, so may the swindler, pondering on a choice of father and mother, taste with his moral sense the various claims of buried greatness. Now, he likes this Prince’s mixture—and now this. He is puzzled, perplexed by the hundred appeals to his filial affection. He is one minute determined to have come from the Montmorencys—the next, he feels a yearning towards the Talbots—and in a few seconds, lo! he will make a kindred to himself from the golden line of D’Este. If the reader possess imagination—and if he do not I tremble for my book—he must sympathise with the delightful tumult in the swindler’s brain and breast, or rather brain alone—(for with your true swindler the brain must have played the Aaron’s rod with the heart, swallowing it whole; a miracle very often performed in the anatomy of great public men)—he must feel more than commonly interested in the contest which is to decide the parentage of our hero. With this allusion to the delicacy of the juncture, we leave the swindler at his books, merely impressing upon him the necessity of choosing a long way back—of electing an ancestor from some by-way catacomb—some seldom visited cemetery—some “untrod on corner i’ the earth.” Nor let him despair; there are at least a round thousand or two of dukes and princes sufficiently obscure in their winding-sheets, albeit possibly brave and blatant enough when in the flesh, from whom the swindler may scratch out a great progenitor. All that is necessary is that the beginner of the