BLACK-LEGS
—is the expressive appellation long since given by the superior classes of the sporting world (consisting of noblemen and gentlemen of fortune) to the very honorable and very distinguished fraternity who are known to constitute "a family," and are, perhaps, without exception, the most unprincipled and abandoned set of thieves and harpies that ever disgraced civilized society. They are a body, existing by, and subsisting upon, the most villainous modes of deceptive depredation: their various modes of attacking, and preying upon, the credulity of the inexperienced and unsuspecting part of the public, are beyond conception: their number is incredible, and their stratagems exceed description. Destitute not only of character, but of every sense of honor, their minds are destined solely to the purposes of determined devastation upon the property of those unthinkingly seduced or betrayed into their company; upon whose credulity and indiscretion they are supported in a continued scene of the most luxurious and fashionable dissipation.
As members have no great power in exerting themselves with much success individually, the firm (if a phalanx of the most infamous combination can be termed so) are adequate to almost every desperate undertaking, from pricking in the belt, hustling in the hat, or slipping a card, to the casually meeting a friend upon Hounslow Heath. They are sole proprietors of the different gaming tables, public and private, as well in the metropolis, as the hazard and E O tables at all the races of eminence in the kingdom. They are invariably present at every fashionable receptacle for sport: the tennis-court, the billiard-room, the cockpit, have all to boast a majority in quest of prey; and even the commonest coffee-house is a spot where modest merit, in the form of a lounging emissary, frequently obtrudes, in the anxious hope of picking up some opulent juvenile, that he may afterwards enjoy the pleasure of introducing him in the most friendly and liberal way to another member of the fraternity, as a very proper object, or pidgeon, well worth plucking for the benefit of the family.