Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/145

Rh, or at least intelligible, to the meanest capacities among them, are the likeliest to have the desired effect; since they convey with them an air of authority, and that knowingness upon shich I have so often insisted, when speaking of other species of street-robberies.

Is my reader liable to get inebriated far from his home? Let him take coach upon such occasions; or, if he call not a coach, let him make up his mind to evade those harpies who ply at the corners of avenues, streets, lanes, under the piazzas, at shop doors, and such like. From these dregs of an abject profession, what can be expected but filth, vermin, disease, and death? Their breath is contamination, their touch is infection, their views, in course, plunder, rapine—and even murder follows. By such as these, men have been decoyed away and totally lost, body and goods; unless indeed the former might be recognised at an anatomist's, or the latter at the pawnbroker's. What other can be expected of the fag-end of the worst finished part of vitiated society, upon whom the pattern of their maker is scarcely distinguishable? and whose minds are embued with so small a portion of his grace, that they appear a distinct race of beings