Transcribed from the 1813 J. Cook edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org [Picture: Public domain book cover] THE PHŒNIX OF SODOM, OR THE _Vere Street Coterie_. * * * * * BEING AN EXHIBITION OF THE GAMBOLS PRACTISED BY THE Ancient Lechers OF _Sodom and Gomorrah_, EMBELLISHED AND IMPROVED WITH THE MODERN REFINEMENTS IN Sodomitical Practices, BY THE MEMBERS OF THE _Vere Street Coterie_, _of detestable memory_. * * * * * SOLD BY J. COOK, AT AND TO BE HAD OF ALL THE BOOKSELLERS. 1813. HOLLOWAY, PRINTER, ARTILLERY LANE, TOOLEY STREET. * * * * * THE VERE STREET COTERIE, OR _The Phœnix of Sodom_. I THINK it a duty I owe both the reader and myself, to account for my acquaintance with any part of the disgraceful transactions disclosed in the annexed pages. Some months ago, when I was contemplating the most odious characters on the list of Attorneys, to compose the Fifth Number of my Strictures on the Practice of those voracious vultures, it came to my knowledge that an Attorney named Wooley (with that alacrity with which crows fly to carrion) had repaired to the different prisons, where those wretches apprehended in Vere Street were committed, and, under pretence of assisting the offenders obtaining their liberty, and enabling them to escape justice, stripped them of every guinea they possessed, and, indeed, of every article that would produce one at a pawnbroker’s. I therefore sent to Newgate, to learn from Cook, the landlord of the house, whether my information was correct; who sent his wife to me, and related a long history of the means and fallacious pretences by which he obtained above thirty pounds from her, for the purpose of _bringing her husband through_; that being the phrase of those fellows, who hang about prisons, to tutor their new clients:—(_I have made use of the expression_ TUTOR, _because there are degrees of iniquity_, _that the most atrocious offenders accustomed to a long residence in the cells of Newgate have yet to learn of a certain description of attorneys_;) in fine, after he had exhausted every stratagem that his colleague the devil and himself could devise to get money, and finding no more could be extracted from nakedness, he became wholly negligent of his client; and in order to get rid of Cook’s importunities, told him he must have fifty pounds more, or