in every parish proclaiming that no vagrant--that is, no person who is
too poor to pay for his lodging--will be permitted to stay there. Where
then does he stay?--every parish unites against him--not a spot of
ground is lawful for him to stand on. At length he is passed on to
his own parish; the meaning of which is, that not finding a decent
livelihood in one place, the laws prevent his seeking it at any other.
By the way, it would not be a bad plan to substitute a vagrant for a
fox, and, to hunt him regularly, you might hunt him with a pack of
respectable persons belonging to the middle class, and eat him when he's
caught. That would be the shortest way to get rid of the race. You might
proclaim a reward for every vagrant's head: it would gain the King more
honour with the rate-payers than clearing the country of wolves won to
his predecessor. What wolf eats so much as a beggar? What wolf so
troublesome, so famished, and so good for nothing? People are quite
right in judging a man's virtue by his wealth; for when a man has not a
shilling he soon grows a rogue. He must live on his wits, and a man's
wits have no conscience when his stomach is empty. We are all very poor
in Hell--very; if we were rich, Satan says, justly, that we should
become idle."

I know not how it is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to
ennui. There's no man so instantaneously bored. What activity does this
singular constitution in all cases produce! All who are sensitive to
ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man. Anything but a
large chair by the fireside, and a family circle! Oh! the bore of going
every day over the same exhausted subjects, to the same dull persons of
respectability; yet that is the doom of all domesticity. Then
_pleasure_! A wretched play--a hot opera, under the ghostly
fathership of Mr. Monck Mason--a dinner of sixteen, with such silence
or _such_ conversation!--a water-party to Richmond, to catch cold