Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/11

 guide to the occasional visitant, and entertaining to all descriptions of readers.

As will be seen in the title page, more persons than one have been employed in putting these sheets into their present form; which will account for, and be the apology of a certain discrepancy of style observable in most of the pages; for it was thought better to incur this charge, than to fritter away the pithy sense of the author by grinding it down to the forms and rules of a stubborn rhetoric.

The terms of art are explained in the vocabulary; to which the reader may have recourse whenever he is under any difficulty. Among them will be found, also, the English rendering of foreign phrases, which have been retained in the body of the work only because they make part of the flash as used by such topping ones as Tom Furby, the young ruffian, Bob Holloway, and such like old ones who knew well how to astonish the natives with scraps of Latin, &c. and who are imitated or copied by great numbers of lads upon every kind of lay. Women street walkers of the better sort affect to talk French upon all occasions, as a means of showing their breeding. Tom's Liverpool widow is supposed to have introduced this species of flummery, and no doubt she had it from him.

In avowing the sources whence we have derived our information, we disclaim any intention of 'peaching those we have fine-drawn, as well as of having used illegal means of coming at the secrets here disclosed. Were it not for such imputation, we could adduce