of his lordship’s honour against the probability of his own rapacious profits.  When he resided in the Temple among those “pullets without feathers,” as an old writer describes the brood, the good man would pule out paternal homilies on improvident youth, grieving that they, under pretence of “learning the law, only learnt to be lawless;” and “never knew by their own studies the process of an execution, till it was served on themselves.”  Nor could he fail in his prophecy; for at the moment that the stoic was enduring their ridicule, his agents were supplying them with the certain means of verifying it.  It is quaintly said, he had his decoying as well as his decaying gentlemen.

The arts practised by the money-traders of that time have been detailed by one of the town-satirists of the age.  Decker, in his “English Villanies,” has told the story:  we may observe how an old story contains many incidents which may be discovered in a modern one.  The artifice of covering the usury by a pretended purchase and sale of certain wares, even now practised, was then at its height.

In Measure for Measure we find,

     “Here’s young Master Rash, he’s in for a commodity of brown
     paper and old ginger, nine score and seventeen pounds; of
     which he made five marks ready money.”

The eager “gull,” for his immediate wants, takes at an immense price any goods on credit, which he immediately resells for less than half the cost; and when despatch presses, the vender and the purchaser have been the same person, and the “brown paper and old ginger” merely nominal.[74]

The whole displays a complete system of dupery, and the agents were graduated.  “The Manner of undoing Gentlemen by taking up of Commodities,” is the title of a chapter in “English Villanies.”  The “warren” is the cant term which describes the whole party; but this requires a word of explanation.

It is probable that rabbit-warrens were numerous about the metropolis, a circumstance which must have multiplied the poachers.  Moffet, who wrote on diet in the reign of Elizabeth, notices their plentiful supply “for the poor’s maintenance.”—­I cannot otherwise account for the appellatives given to sharpers, and the terms of cheatery being so familiarly drawn from a rabbit-warren; not that even in that day these cant terms travelled far out of their own circle; for Robert Greene mentions a trial in which the judges, good simple men! imagined that the coney-catcher at the bar was a warrener, or one who had the care of a warren.

The cant term of “warren” included the young coneys, or half-ruined prodigals of that day, with the younger brothers, who had accomplished their ruin; these naturally herded together, as the pigeon and the black-leg of the present day.  The coney-catchers were those who raised a trade on their necessities.  To be “conie-catched” was to be cheated.  The warren forms a combination altogether, to attract