See what mishaps dare e'en invade Whitehall, This silly fellow's death puts off the ball, And disappoints the Queen, poor little chuck; I warrant t'would have danced it like a duck. The fiddlers, voices, entries, all the sport, And the gay show put off, where the brisk court Anticipates, in rich subsidy coats, All that is got by necessary votes. Yet shall Whitehall, the innocent, the good, See these men dance, all daubed with lace and blood."[219] The "subsidy coats" allude to Charles's raising money for his profligate expenditure under pretence of the public service. The last couplet would have done credit to a better satire. As we are upon the subject of a neighbourhood to which they apply, we shall proceed to give a few more extracts from Mr. Malcolm, highly characteristic of the lower orders of desperadoes in Charles's reign. "The various deceivers," he tells us, "who preyed upon the public at this time were exposed in a little filthy work called the 'Canting Academy,' which went through more than one edition (the second is dated 1674). I shall select from it enough to show the variety of villany practised under their various names. The _Ruffler_ was a wretch who assumed the character of a maimed soldier, and begged from the claims of Naseby, Edgehill, Newbury, and Marston Moor. Those who were stationed in the city of London were generally found in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden; and their prey was people of fashion, whose coaches were attacked boldly; and if denied, their owners were told, ''Tis a sad thing that an old crippled cavalier should be suffered to beg for a maintenance, and a young cavalier that had never heard the whistle of a bullet should ride in his coach.' "There were people called _Anglers_, from the nature of their method of depredating, which was thus.--They had a rod or stick, with an iron hook affixed: this they introduced through a window, or any other aperture, where plunder might be procured, and helped themselves at pleasure; the day was occupied by them in the character of beggars, when they made their observations for the angling of the night.