“Shame is ashamed to sit.”
A money-lender, a courtier, steeped to the lips in broken promises—a pick-pocket caught in the act, all of these may, if they can, blush and not be ruined; but woe to the swindler whose cheek admits the self-accusing tint! His face, like the face of the man in the moon, must look down upon all sorts of acted abominations, yet blench not.
Mustachios.—These were pretty things for the profession; but I grieve to say it, lawyers’ clerks, linen-drapers’ apprentices, players out of place, and even pedestrian vendors of lucifer matches, have detracted from their exclusive importance; hence, I would counsel the youthful, sanguine swindler to eschew what indeed vulgar usage has rendered a very questionable advantage, and to swindle with clean lips. It is enough to break the heart of a rabbi to see how one of “Heaven’s best gifts,” the human beard, is in these hirsute days cut and notched according to the impudence or ignorance of the wearer. It is said of the French that they have a thousand ways of cooking an egg: let it be our boast that we have as many modes of dressing the chin. I have, I hope, a love of the picturesque, as the world will one day know from a work of mine still, unhappily, in manuscript.[[15]] I, therefore, am a passionate admirer of the beard of patriarchal growth; but for your nasty, stunted, straggly, ragged, edgy things—now like the skin of a dog with the mange, now like the end of a skein of whitey-brown thread, now as if culled from chopped hay, and now as if cut from a singed blanket—pah!—were I caliph for a day—but no matter, let me not wander to legislation, but stick to my higher subject—Swindling. I say, then, to my disciple, eschew mustachios. At best they are a doubtful good. If, however, you are determined to wear them, let me hope that their hue is black as death. If, on the contrary, Heaven has awarded you a pair of pale gold or deep carrot colour, tamper not with them, but shave. Never, like Richard, think to stand “the hazard of the die”; if so, your case is desperate. I knew three promising young fellows, all of whom laid their ruin at the door of Mr Rowland. But—for I like to anticipate—it may be asked, Do you always, Captain Whitefeather, walk abroad with unrazored lips? To this I boldly answer that—for I was justified in the vanity—I did wear an adorned mouth; more, that a lady, who shall be nameless, was in hysterics (of course at intervals) for three days, when my mustachios fell; but no, I could not condescend to wear them when I saw—yes, I confess it—even a better pair than my own upon the face of a fellow in the Surrey gallery, selling play-bills, Spanish nuts, and ginger beer. What the revolution of society may in time produce it would of course be impudence in me, who am not a Paternoster Row astrologer, to declare; but, for the next five-and-twenty years, mustachios will, I think, be a dangerous decoration for the swindler. So much business has been done with them that suspicion will have scarcely subsided under at least another quarter of a century. The horse-tails of Ibrahim Pacha have not been more triumphant; but victory will not always perch upon the same banner.
[15]. The Handbook of Ratcliffe Highway, an inestimable work (when printed) for the stranger in London.—[John Jackdaw, Ed.]
The swindler should not at the present day hope to take the Philistines by the strength of his hair. No; let him shave, and put the barest face upon the dignity of his profession—it cannot be too bare.
CHAPTER IV
OF THE PARENTAGE AND NAME OF A SWINDLER—OF HIS EQUIPAGE—OF HIS MORAL PHILOSOPHY
The professor of our distinguished art has, it must be conceded, this peculiar and most grateful advantage—he may choose his ancestors. With the Peerage or the Red Book open before him, it lies within his own breast to decide whether he shall have come from the loins of a Norman baron—of one of the boldest of that invincible band of marauders and thieves who jumped on Hastings beach—or whether he shall be the last of a collateral branch of the Strozzi, or Frangepani, or of any other Italian house whose beginning, in the opinion of divers heralds, dates from beyond Numa. Here is a glorious prerogative! The swindler may make his own coat-of-arms, although his immediate father walked the earth without a shirt. Show me any other man possessing so delicious a privilege. With long rolls of knights and barons, and earls and princes before him, how the swindler may play the epicure with the mighty dead! How loftily, yet how serenely, may he contemplate the titled dust of bygone generations! Even as your dainty snuff-taker coquets with a dozen samples of the odoriferous tobacco, so may the swindler, pondering on a choice of father and mother, taste with his moral sense the various claims of buried greatness. Now, he likes this Prince’s mixture—and now this. He is puzzled, perplexed by the hundred appeals to his filial affection. He is one minute determined to have come from the Montmorencys—the next, he feels a yearning towards the Talbots—and in a few seconds, lo! he will make a kindred to himself from the golden line of D’Este. If the reader possess imagination—and if he do not I tremble for my book—he must sympathise with the delightful tumult in the swindler’s brain and breast, or rather brain alone—(for with your true swindler the brain must have played the Aaron’s rod with the heart, swallowing it whole; a miracle very often performed in the anatomy of great public men)—he must feel more than commonly interested in the contest which is to decide the parentage of our hero. With this allusion to the delicacy of the juncture, we leave the swindler at his books, merely impressing upon him the necessity of choosing a long way back—of electing an ancestor from some by-way catacomb—some seldom visited cemetery—some “untrod on corner i’ the earth.” Nor let him despair; there are at least a round thousand or two of dukes and princes sufficiently obscure in their winding-sheets, albeit possibly brave and blatant enough when in the flesh, from whom the swindler may scratch out a great progenitor. All that is necessary is that the beginner of the family shall have lived in the dim twilight of civilisation—that he shall be so far away that all the Herald’s Colleges, with all their spectacles upon their collective noses, shall not be able to perceive whether the disentombed thing be flesh or phantom. Very satisfactory progenitors have been found, with arms to match, of thew and sinew just as questionable. If, however, the swindler will have a mighty ancestor, let him, I repeat, go far enough for him: when a man wants a marquis, or an earl, or a count, for his great-grandfather, he should not grudge a long walk—even though he walk blindfold and backwards—for the commodity. So much for the ambitious swindler.
The swindler, however, who trusts to his unassisted genius, and disdains the lustre of any specious trophies from the churchyard, may with a very laudable pride refuse to make to himself a grandfather, being possibly contented with the grandsire selected by his grandmother for him. Some men—and let me do all homage to their simplicity—turn up their noses at the genealogical tree, even though its roots were struck at Tyburn: the swindler of sanguine spirit may be of this proud kidney; and all the better: I augur more of his ultimate triumph. However, though he shall refuse a herald-begotten progenitor, it may be highly necessary for him that he shall choose a name. His own may have become celebrated for family achievements wide away of his purpose; and therefore, whilst with filial affection he sticks to his own father and mother, disdaining the blood of Norman, Guelph, or Ghibelline—it may be imperative upon him to assume a nominal device not hitherto borne by any of his kin. The swindler wants a name. Here, then, we approach a delicate, yes, a difficult point. Let me, however, set out with a solemn injunction to the swindler, that in the choice of a name “he throw away ambition.” Considerable nicety is required in the selection of a good title for swindling; a number of fine young fellows having—if I may lighten the solemnity of this essay with a familiar phrase—“let the cat out of the bag” by the incautious assumption of a high-sounding, flowery, no-meaning patronymic. The truth is, the detestable rage for novels has so familiarised the world with a set of sugar-and-water heroes—of exquisite gentlemen, all of them worthy of a glass case lest the flies should soil them—that their very excess of virtue has put them on the hue and cry of suspicion. Hence “Delacour,” “Erpingham,” “Rosenthorp,” “Millefleur,” and a thousand others of the courtly and sweet-smelling class, all in their time excellent names for swindling (that is, for swindling in the higher sense of the term, for in “fine wire wove” they swindle still), are now no other than brands, stigmata, by which the calling of the professor is instantly suspected. Hence, my dear pupil, take no sweet, pastry-cook name from a novel; cull no flower from a play-bill; but look, as either a poet or a member of Parliament says, I forget which, “look abroad into universality” for the thing desired. As you walk the street cast your eyes above the door of the worthy shopkeeper. A thousand to one that in a day’s saunter you will possess yourself, and from such a source, of a name in every respect unexceptionable. Yes, from the board of the thriving, honest, painstaking, till-respecting tradesman. And if so, how ingenious, how pleasant withal, to obtain one of your best weapons from, so to speak, the armoury of the enemy, to be fleshed immediately upon him! It is perhaps unnecessary to warn the young swindler that he must not be too homely in his choice. There is a class of names which, from their very abundance, makes it a matter of constructive ignominy to swindle under them. And some of these are Jones, Walsh, Welsh, Thomson, Johnson, Dobson, White, Brown, Williams, Simpson, Smithson, and that multitudinous monosyllable, Smith! If, in a moment of hilarity you break a lamp, wrench off a knocker, or snap a bell wire, why any one of these names may be, as of course every gentleman well knows, confidently given in to the night constable; but to attempt to swindle under them betrays a petty larceny spirit in the professor, from which my experience looks for little present gain or future reputation. No; the name of a swindler should be like the wardrobe of the true gentleman—a thing not challenging vulgar attention; but, if examined, found to be of the very best material and of the choicest workmanship. Hence let the swindler choose between a clinquant (I do believe this is almost the first bit of French appearing in the essay, for the which I confess myself deficient in the graces of modern literature[[16]]), between the clinquant of novel heroes and the homeliness of “base mechanics”—let his name be a solid, substantial, downright English name.
[16]. The Captain is in error. Though his essay is, assuredly, barren of “the tongues,” the author knows more of bookmaking than he apparently chooses to confess.—[John Jackdaw, Ed.]