I cannot leave the world without a short description of that kind of life, which I have led for some years past; and is exactly the same with the rest of our wicked brethren.

Although we are generally so corrupted from our childhood, as to have no sense of goodness; yet something heavy always hangs about us, I know not what it is, that we are never easy till we are half drunk among our whores and companions; nor sleep sound, unless we drink longer than we can stand.  If we go abroad in the day, a wise man would easily find us to be rogues by our faces; we have such a suspicious, fearful, and constrained countenance; often turning back, and slinking through narrow lanes and alleys.  I have never failed of knowing a brother thief by his looks, though I never saw him before.  Every man among us keeps his particular whore, who is however common to us all, when we have a mind to change.  When we have got a booty, if it be in money, we divide it equally among our companions, and soon squander it away on our vices in those houses that receive us; for the master and mistress, and the very tapster, go snacks; and besides make us pay treble reckonings.  If our plunder be plate, watches, rings, snuff-boxes, and the like; we have customers in all quarters of the town to take them off.  I have seen a tankard worth fifteen pounds sold to a fellow in ——­ street for twenty shillings; and a gold watch for thirty.  I have set down his name, and that of several others in the paper already mentioned.  We have setters watching in corners, and by dead walls, to give us notice when a gentleman goes by; especially if he be anything in drink.  I believe in my conscience, that if an account were made of a thousand pounds in stolen goods; considering the low rates we sell them at, the bribes we must give for concealment, the extortions of alehouse-reckonings, and other necessary charges, there would not remain fifty pounds clear to be divided among the robbers.  And out of this we must find clothes for our whores, besides treating them from morning to night; who, in requital, reward us with nothing but treachery and the pox.  For when our money is gone, they are every moment threatening to inform against us, if we will not go out to look for more.  If anything in this world be like hell, as I have heard it described by our clergy; the truest picture of it must be in the back-room of one of our ale-houses at midnight; where a crew of robbers and their whores are met together after a booty, and are beginning to grow drunk, from which time, until they are past their senses, is such a continued horrible noise of cursing, blasphemy, lewdness, scurrility, and brutish behaviour; such roaring and confusion, such a clatter of mugs and pots at each other’s heads, that Bedlam, in comparison, is a sober and orderly place:  At last they all tumble from their stools and benches, and sleep away the rest of the night; and generally the landlord or his wife, or some other whore who has a stronger head than the rest, picks their pockets before they wake.  The misfortune is, that we can never be easy till we are drunk; and our drunkenness constantly exposes us to be more easily betrayed and taken.