has
been equally limited. No correct account has ever yet been given of
this idle, but cunning class of the community. All that we have been
told concerning them, is, to use the common phrase, but mere hearsay.
We remember reading, some few years ago, of one of those begging
gentry boasting of being able to make five shillings a day. He
considered that sixty streets were easily got through, from sunrise to
sunset, and that it was strange indeed if he could not collect a penny
in every street. Now, this very same anecdote we read, not many days
since, in a new work, entitled, "A History of the Working Classes," as
something, of course, just brought to light.

The story, too, in that by-gone piece of notoriety, "Pierce Egan's
Life in London," about the beggar's opera, where the lame and the
blind, and other disordered individuals, were said to meet nightly, in
a place called the "back slums," to throw off their infirmities, and
laugh at the credulity of the public, was, not a great many weeks ago,
trumped up into a paragraph in one of our weekly journals as a fact
just discovered, and the curious were referred to a certain house in
St. Giles's, in corroboration thereof. Indeed, we think it would be
easy to prove that what little is known of the Common Lodging House,
and those people the Cadgers, is neither more nor less than mere
reports, and which like the generality of reports, contain not always
the truth.

It certainly appears strange that those two subjects, which offer such
an abundance of original matter to writers and other observers of
mankind, should have remained so long without any other notice than
merely that they were known to exist. Seemingly strange, however, as
this singularity is, sufficient reasons, perhaps, may be given for it.
There can be little doubt, at least there is none in our mind, that
since the commencement of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_, periodicals
have principally assisted in developing, if we may so term it, the
powers of observation. Intelligent readers of this kind of literature
would naturally turn away from the insipid stuff of the rhymer, and
the equally sentimental trash of the getter-up of fiction, of which
our old magazines were mostly composed, to the more rational parts of
the publication, such as original essays, critiques, stories which had
really some truth for their foundation, or any thing which bore the
stamp of newness. This secret of attraction would, of course, soon