One was tickled by the title, but looked blank when he understood that there was no murderer—no highwayman in it. He declared that the only way to keep a reader awake was to commit at least one murder in every page; that the gallows was now the only bay tree, and that even the youthful generation sucked intelligence and morals from tales of the gibbet, with the same eagerness and the same advantage that they sucked liquorice root! “Season it, sir—season it,” said one bland gentleman, “with a handful of murders—a terrific storm on the New River—and a miraculous escape from Marylebone watchhouse, and there may be some hopes of it.” A second asked me to change the title into “The Handbook of the Money Markets,” adding, to my astonishment, that he had no doubt the staple of the matter would serve equally well. A third—but why should I enumerate the rebuffs endured? No; let me rather, in the name of an obliged generation, register a gratitude to the enlightened spirit under whose auspices the book appears—a work destined, as the Editor with all diffidence declares, to work a good as incalculable as, perhaps, unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PRINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS EDINBURGH ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ After the chapter “THE DRILL SERGEANT,” there is a second book included in this text entitled “The HANDBOOK of SWINDLING”, which begins on page 199. There is no explanation of this. It is formatted a bit differently from “The Essays,” with no page breaks between chapters and two chapters are numbered “I”—one on page 199 and the other on page 201. ○ There is a final chapter on page 261 that does not appear in the Table of contents. ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).