130 My Lodgings: a Sketch from Life. [Auc; 
the labourer—the victim of all above him—who has neither money nor 
credit. 
We look upon the credit-system, in short, as the parent of more dis- 
order, disturbance, and crime, than all the other causes of irregularity in 
society put together; and for much of the enormous, and we may add, 
alarming extent, to which it has been carried of late years, we may thank 
our prodigal and paper government. The spendthrift borrowings, the tricks 
and treacheries of the stocks, the extollings of credit, the vaunted achieve- 
ments of financial dexterity, the wonders of sinking-funds, and miracles 
of compound interest—the advantages and glories of these things have 
been sung by the servile agents of power, and lauded in the tribunals of 
justice, till every man who confined himself to his real and substantial 
resources was brought to feel ashamed of his own contemptible timidity. 
Loans could be raised—loans, too, that were to liquidate themselves, and 
the expense come out of nobody’s pocket. If a government could do 
thus, why not individuals ? We shall find a time to trace this matter 
home; in the mean while—no arrest and no imprisonment for debt. Let 
creditors look to themselves, and not part with their goods without an 
equivalent. Then will they no longer need the stern protection of iron 
laws; then will vanish at once the anxieties of the creditor, and the © 
heart-aches of the debtor ; and lawyers and _ bailiffs, who, vampire-like, 
suck the life-blood of the miserable, go—ad malam rem. 
MY LODGINGS: A SKETCH FROM LIFE. 
I am, whether for my sins or no I cannot exactly say, a single gen- 
tleman. For years I have been habituated to a rambling life—an Arab 
existence, that knows not to-day where it will be to-morrow, but takes 
circumstances as it finds them, and is ready-for any part of the world in 
something less than ten minutes. For months past, however, this Be- 
douin disposition has evinced symptoms of what lawyers would call a 
settlement ; I have become stationary like St. Paul’s—fixed as Primrose- 
hill—a specimen of absolute immobility. Whether my reasons for such 
local adhesiveness are of native growth, or merely forced up, as it were, 
upon the hot-bed of eccentricity, the reader, when he has perused this_ 
veracious narrative, must himself judge. To begin with my lodgings: 
they are situated on the confines of civilization at Camberwell, and form 
the ground-floor of a house, exceedingly tall for its age, being only two 
years’ old; containing three stories and a decent-sized garden, skirted 
by.an unhappy-looking patch of mould, which a philanthropist might 
dignify as a meadow, but an agriculturist would baptize a nondescript. 
Beside this amphibious half-acre, aad just—at.the extremity of the 
garden, stands an enormity yclept a summer-house, in which, on Sun- 
days, my landlord and family regale themselves ; the one smoking the 
leaves to death with tobacco; the other, more romantic, admiring the 
beauties of their domain; on which may be seen, at times, a stray 
porker, a duck or two, a dog, a cat, or the fore-quarters of a donkey (a 
neighbour of mine), as he peeps wistfully through an adjoining hedge at 
the thistles which luxuriate in this, to him, forbidden paradise. Thus 
