[22] This is a curious volume, and is worth from one to two guineas. The Canting Dictionary was afterwards reprinted, word for word, with the title of The Scoundrel’s Dictionary, in 1751. It was originally published, without date, about the year 1710 by B. E., under the title of a Dictionary of the Canting Crew.
[23] Bacchus and Venus, 1737.
[24] Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor, vol. iii., No. 43, Oct. 4th, 1851.
[25] Mayhew (vol. i., p. 217), speaks of a low lodging-house, “in which there were at one time five university men, three surgeons, and several sorts of broken down clerks.” But old Harman’s saying, that “a wylde Roge is he that is borne a roge,” will perhaps explain this seeming anomaly.
[26] Mr. Rawlinson’s Report to the General Board of Health, Parish of Havant, Hampshire.
[27] Vol. v., p. 210.
[28] Vol. i., pages 218 and 247.
[29] See [Dictionary].
[30] Sometimes, as appears from the following, the names of persons and houses are written instead. “In almost every one of the padding-kens, or low lodging-houses in the country, there is a list of walks pasted up over the kitchen mantel piece. Now at St. Albans, for instance, at the ——, and at other places, there is a paper stuck up in each of the kitchens. This paper is headed “Walks out of this Town,” and underneath it is set down the names of the villages in the neighbourhood at which a beggar may call when out on his walk, and they are so arranged as to allow the cadger to make a round of about six miles each day, and return the same night. In many of these papers there are sometimes twenty walks set down. No villages that are in any way “gammy” [bad] are ever mentioned in these papers, and the cadger, if he feels inclined to stop for a few days in the town, will be told by the lodging-house keeper, or the other cadgers that he may meet there, what gentlemen’s seats or private houses are of any account on the walk that he means to take. The names of the good houses are not set down in the paper for fear of the police.”—Mayhew, vol. i., p. 418.
[31] Mayhew, vol. i., p. 218.