ghbourhood. Who does not
remember the description of foreign beggars in the 'Sentimental Journey'?
Many of us have witnessed the loathsome appearance and humorous
importunity of Irish mendicants. A century ago England rivalled both
France and Ireland in the number of its professional beggars. In the
days when travelling was mostly performed on horseback, the foot of the
hills--the point where the rider drew bridle--was the station of the
mendicant, and long practice enabled him to proportion his clamorous
petitions to the length of the ascent. {56} The old soldier in 'Gil
Blas' stood by the wayside with a carbine laid across two sticks, and
solicited, or rather enforced, the alms of the passer-by, by an appeal to
his fears no less than to his pity. The readers of the old drama will
recall to mind the shifts and devices of the 'Jovial Beggars;'--how
easily a wooden leg was slipped off and turned into a bludgeon; how
inscrutable were the disguises, and how copious and expressive the slang,
of the mendicant crew. Coleridge has justly described 'The Beggar's
Bush' as one of the most pleasant of Fletcher's comedies; and if the
Spanish novelists do not greatly belie the roads of their land, the
mendicant levied his tolls on the highways as punctually as the king
himself. Speed in travelling has been as prejudicial to these merry and
unscrupulous gentry as acts against vagrancy or the policeman's staff.
He should be a sturdy professor of his art who would pour forth his
supplications on a railway platform; and Belisarius himself would hardly
venture to stop a modern carriage for the chance of an _obolus_, to be
flung from its window. A few of the craft indeed linger in bye-roads and
infest our villages and streets; but _ichabod_!--its glory has departed;
and the most humane or romantic of travellers may without scruple consign
the modern collector of highway alms to the tender mercies of the next
policeman and the reversion of the treadmill.

The modern highway is seldom in a direct line. A hill, a ford, or a wood
sufficed to render it circuitous. All roads indeed through hilly
countries were originally struck out by drivers of pack-horses, who, to
avoid bogs, chose the upper ground. Roads were first made the subject of
legislation in England in the sixteenth century: until then, they had
been made at will and repaired at pleasure. A similar neglect of
uniformity may be seen in Hungary and in Eastern Europe generall