A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS IN THE METROPOLIS

The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation—­your only modern Alcides’ club to rid the time of its abuses—­is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear MENDICITY from the metropolis.  Scrips, wallets, bags—­staves, dogs, and crutches—­the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh persecution.  From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turnings of allies, the parting Genius of Beggary is “with sighing sent.”

I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or bellum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a species.  Much good might be sucked from these Beggars.

They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism.  Their appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian.  Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment.

There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery.

The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses; and when Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel any thing towards him but contempt?  Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same compassionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius begging for an obolum?  Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic?

The Blind Beggar in the legend—­the father of pretty Bessy—­whose story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements—­this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary—­would the child and parent have cut a better figure, doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board?

In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King.  The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them) when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet.  The depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from.  There is no medium which can be presented to the imagination without offence.  There is no breaking the fall.  Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer “mere nature;” and Cresseid, fallen from a prince’s love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty, supplicating lazar alms with bell and clap-dish.