, though a very old "file,"
who was sentenced for getting money under false pretences, and the other
a little boy who had been found guilty of sleeping under a colonnade; it
being the especial beauty of the English law to make no fine-drawn and
nonsensical shades of difference between vice and misfortune, and its
peculiar method of protecting the honest being to make as many rogues as
possible in as short a space of time.

CHAPTER VIII.

Common Sense. What is the end of punishment as regards the individual
punished?

Custom. To make him better!

Common Sense. How do you punish young offenders who are (from their
youth) peculiarly alive to example, and whom it is therefore more easy
either to ruin or reform than the matured?

Custom. We send them to the House of Correction, to associate with the
d--dest rascals in the country!

Dialogue between Common Sense and Custom.--Very scarce.

As it was rather late in the day when Paul made his first entree at
Bridewell, he passed that night in the "receiving-room." The next
morning, as soon as he had been examined by the surgeon and clothed in
the customary uniform, he was ushered, according to his classification,
among the good company who had been considered guilty of that
compendious offence, "a misdemeanour." Here a tall gentleman marched up
to him, and addressed him in a certain language, which might be called
the freemasonry of flash, and which Paul, though he did not comprehend
verbatim, rightly understood to be an inquiry whether he was a thorough
rogue and an entire rascal. He answered half in confusion, half in
anger; and his reply was so detrimental to any favourable influence he
might otherwise have exercised over the interrogator, that the latter
personage, giving him a pinch in the ear, shouted out, "Ramp, ramp!" and
at that significant and awful word, Paul found himself surrounded in a
trice by a whole host of ingenious tormentors. One pulled this member,
another pinched that; one cuffed him before, and another thrashed him
behind. By way of interlude to this pleasing occupation, they stripped
him of the very few things that in his change of dress he had retained.
One carried off his handkerchief, a second his neckcloth, and a
third, luckier than either, possessed himself of a pair of carnelian
shirt-buttons, given to Paul as a gage d'amour by a young lady who
sold oranges near the Tower. Happily, before this initiatory
process--technically termed "r