many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the
bugbear MENDICITY from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags--staves,
dogs, and crutches--the whole mendicant fraternity with all their
baggage are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh
persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets
and turnings of allies, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighing
sent."

I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent
crusado, or _bellum ad exterminationem_, proclaimed against a species.
Much good might be sucked from these Beggars.

They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their
appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind
than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any
fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian.
Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the
assessment.

There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation;
as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go
in livery.

The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when
Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel any thing towards
him but contempt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying
a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the
same heroic pity, the same compassionate admiration, with which we
regard his Belisarius begging for an _obolum_? Would the moral have
been more graceful, more pathetic?