THE LAST CENTURY. 27$ 



and of Smollett, we find such persons as clergymen 

 and men of a respectable rank in life, travelling by 

 waggon, a conveyance now * confined to the lowest 

 and most needy of the populace. For the shorter 

 distances round London and the great towns, there 

 were, it is true, stage-coaches ; but these, from the 

 slowness of their motion, were overtaken or stopped 

 at pleasure, and thus they offered an easy prey to 

 the knights of the road. Another cause of impunity 

 and the contempt with which the laws were treated 

 by the violators of them, was the corruption and 

 insufficiency of our protective regulations. There were 

 no police. A more consummate set of scoundrels, as 

 our criminal annals bear witness, could not have been 

 found than the subordinate officers of justice. The 

 lapse of a few years shows us no less than seven 

 thief-takers who ended their days on ' Tyburn tree,' 

 for various desperate crimes of which they had been 

 convicted. The roads in the neighbourhood of the 

 metropolis were so infested with robbers, that the 

 Duke of Newcastle of that period declared that for 

 a man of rank and property to travel fifty miles 

 unmolested was so unusual a fact that it was quite 

 exceptional. The character of Macheath, in The 

 Beggars Opera, was not in the slightest degree 

 overdrawn, though some modern critics declare it to 

 be so. The petty larceny knave of these degenerate 

 days (1830) of thieving can furnish no point of com- 

 parison with the dashing, well-dressed, well-mounted 

 men, who rode forth with loaded pistols and jauntily- 

 cocked hats to stop a gentleman's carriage or rob the 

 mail. It is true that they did so at the risk of their 

 lives, not so much dreading the scaffold as the pistol 

 * This work from which I quote was published 1830. 



T 2 



