Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/150

134 swallowed up so many fine fellows before you. While thus treating them in a gin-shop, they will make free with your pocket handkerchief, or other more valuable article; sometimes when you do not order freely, one will pretend to sqnare at you, and hit you in the pit of the stomach; and before you recover your wind, they get away safely—then you have leisure to search your pockets for what may be wanting.

Whatever is most subtle, whatever is most engaging in vice, has throughout been our chiefest, constant, wish to warn the novice against falling iuto. The coarser appeals to the mere man, his animal feelings and temperament, by the degraded set who ply the streets, have been already described; we come now to such as every man is likely to find at his lodgings, his place of business, or his resort for pleasure. As the last mentioned includes the theatre, as well as the tavern or public house, to which latter, at the season of agitated politics, almost every man of intelligence resorts occasionally,—we shall speak of it the first.

He who goes to the Theatres without some (large) portion of buoyancy of heart, is ill-fitted for the intellectual treat, or the moral lessons, furnished at them; but we will not suppose,