I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen
receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been
made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any
one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence.
I ought to know something of the Begging-Letter Writer. He has
besieged my door at all hours of the day and night; he has fought
my servant; he has lain in ambush for me, going out and coming in;
he has followed me out of town into the country; he has appeared at
provincial hotels, where I have been staying for only a few hours;
he has written to me from immense distances, when I have been out
of England. He has fallen sick; he has died and been buried; he
has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory
scene: he has been his own son, his own mother, his own baby, his
idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather. He has
wanted a greatcoat, to go to India in; a pound to set him up in
life for ever; a pair of boots to take him to the coast of China; a
hat to get him into a permanent situation under Government. He has
frequently been exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence.
He has had such openings at Liverpool - posts of great trust and
confidence in merchants' houses, which nothing but seven-and-
sixpence was wanting to him to secure - that I wonder he is not
Mayor of that flourishing town at the present moment.

The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a
most astounding nature. He has had two children who have never
grown up; who have never had anything to cover them at night; who
have been continually driving him mad, by asking in vain for food;
who have never come out of fevers and measles (which, I suppose,
has accounted for his fuming his letters with tobacco smoke, as a
disinfectant); who have never changed in the least degree through