crimes. To believe that the administrators of the laws are in earnest in their endeavour to repress the honest labours of the commonwealth of plunderers is a mere delusion-a mental hallucination -a prejudice which is cultivated with infinite care, for the sole object of rendering the legal possessors of property easy in their minds. It is a pleasing and satisfying belief—“amabilis insania, et mentis gratissimus error." The thieves and the police magistrates know better. The profession is most diligently patronised by the administrators of the laws; not to speak it profanely, there are regular articles of co-parceny between the thief and those who are falsely imagined to be his pursuers. "Latro is arraigned and fur sits on the bench." Those who affect to be hunting out the criminal are the dignitaries of the commonwealth of crime.

The mistaken people who, in general, are hanged, or transported, or immured in solitary cells, or whipped, are not registered in the University of Larceny. They are fools who attempt to do business in a small way, without regard to the corporate rights of Bow Street and Union Hall. They have not graduated, and they must pay the penalty. But a prudent adventurer never enters the higher walks of the profession without protection. He incurs no risks; he surrenders a handsome portion of his profits to enjoy the remainder in peace "under his own fig-tree." To such the police is not an affair of discovery or of prevention, but of regulation. There is no affectation of a want of

union in the several callings of the thief and the officer. They have grown together in happy relationship since the days of Jonathan Wild. A poet of the last century says,

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'My evenings all I would with sharpers spend,
And make the thief-catcher my bosom friend."

And indeed they are very pretty companions together over their claret. The dignitary sits with his feet under the same mahogany with the returned convict; or he is Vice to the Rothschild of the flash-house, who at that moment is negotiating with the partners of the Bristol Bank, touching the return of twenty thousand pounds' worth of abstracted bills, for the honourable consideration of fifty per cent. and no prosecution.

Civilisation was very little advanced when the commonwealth of thieves was really persecuted. The present administration of the laws against felony is the key-stone that binds the arch of depredation. Without magistrates and officers, who do not prevent crime, but nurse it, men individually would peril their lives against those who invade their property. But all this possible bloodshed is now saved. A well-ordered police, the stipendiaries at once of the public and those who ease the public of their superfluous possessions, accommodates all difficulties; and, gradually, the rights of thieves are as effectually recognised as the rights of any other painstaking class of the community. Look at this arrangement, and see, not only how much

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it has contributed to the respectability of the profession of larceny, but what an insurance of their lives it gives to society, by rendering robbery a quiet gentlemanly art, in which violence is only the argument of bunglers, and which is carried to the highest point of perfection by that division of labour, upon which all excellence, whether mental or mechanical, must be built.

It occasionally happens that the most brilliant example of professional success is apprehended, convicted, and hanged. This is part of the contract by which the commonwealth of thieves has purchased its charter. The compact is--for the police, a share of profits, and no trouble;-for the sons of Mercury, protection in general, and a very sparing selection of needful victims. When the time arrives that the career of individual happiness and friendship is to close, there is no shrinking. The ripened felon is a soldier, under the orders of a commander whom he honours; and it is to him a gratification to look back upon the years of comfort he has secured by this compromise with power, instead of being perpetually hunted into some pitiful occupation, which the world calls honest, by a vigilance which should never sleep. At last he dies. Well! in the latest moment he is a privileged being. Fame hovers around him, from the bar to the gallows. He exhibits great composure on his trial; leaves his defence, with a dignified satisfaction, to his counsel; bows to the judge, when he pronounces sentence; and "is fashionably dressed

in a complete suit of black." Then come the consolations of spiritual friends. In the interval between the condemnation and the Recorder's report, he becomes perfectly satisfied that he is purified from every stain ;-after the fatal mandate arrives, he declares that his only anxiety is to die, lest he should fall into his former errors; and he leaves the world with such exultations of pious people attending him, as martyrs were wont to monopolize, -bowing to the admiring crowd, and "sucking an orange till the drop falls!"

DEAR AND CHEAP.

ON the 2nd November, 1667, the pleasure-hunting Samuel Pepys, Esq., goes to the King's Playhouse, where he saw Henry the Fourth ;'-and there he saw something which he deems as worthy of record as Cartwright's acting: "The house full of Parliament-men, it being holiday with them; and it was observable how a gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as dead, being choked; but with much ado Orange Mall did thrust her finger down his throat, and brought him to life. again." Orange Mall was a person of energy and discretion; and as she sold her oranges to Parliament-men in the boxes of the King's Playhouse, which they sucked without a compromise of their gentility, she imparted many a piece of scandal, and joined in many an aristocratic laugh which was louder than the voices of the players. In another entry of his 'Diary,' Pepys says, "Sir W. Pen and I had a great deal of discourse with Mall, who tells us that Nell is already left by my Lord Buckhurst." Some sixty years after, Hogarth painted the Orange Malls of his time, in 'The Laughing Audience.' One of these ladies in the boxes is presenting her fruit to an admiring beau in a bag-wig; whilst