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BOSWELL. 'Curst be the spring, the water. JOHNSON. 'But let us consider what a sad thing it would be, if we were obliged to drink or do any thing else that may happen to be agreeable to the company where we are. LANGTON. 'By the same rule you must join with a gang of cut-purses. JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir: but yet we must do justice to wine; we must allow it the power it possesses.
What would be a heap of money for a poor supercargo is for his highness the Padischa only a trifle; and even if it had been possible to lay an embargo on the whole cargo, representing a value of ten or twelve thousand ducats, by the time it had passed through the fingers of all the informers, tax-collectors, and other official cut-purses, there would be hardly enough left for the sultan to fill his pipe with.
In the midst of this band of cut-purses I saw the so-called wife of the pretended Chevalier de Sabi, a pretty woman from Saxony, who, speaking Italian indifferently well, was paying her addresses to the Countess Piccolomini.
"This rascally crew of cut-throats, whom his villainous highness headed," said Miranda, "were an almost immense number then, being divided in three bodies London cut-purses, Hounslow Heath highwaymen, and assistant-coiners, but all owning him for their lord and master.
There are many cut-purses among them, and if the rigour of the prince did not cut them off, they could not be avoided.
The state prison had disgorged its convicts the slums and subterranean recesses of the city its birds of the night and now, felons and malefactors, robbers, cut-purses and murderers held their riotous and drunken carnival in the streets, flowing with whiskey. Over all surged the flames, roaring, crackling, tumultuous the black clouds of smoke drifting far away, under the blue skies of spring.
Dost take us for common plunderers, for mere thieves, cut-purses, housebreakers, and villains of that low, miserable stamp?"
BOSWELL. 'Curst be the SPRING, the WATER. JOHNSON. 'But let us consider what a sad thing it would be, if we were obliged to drink or do any thing else that may happen to be agreeable to the company where we are. LANGTON. 'By the same rule you must join with a gang of cut-purses. JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir: but yet we must do justice to wine; we must allow it the power it possesses.
When every other fine morning a dozen cut-purses were hanged at Tyburn, and when such sights did not run very strongly against the popular current, the spectacle was vulgar, and could be of use only to the possible cut-purses congregated around the foot of the scaffold.
For a good end this wise and mirth-loving lawyer would play the part of a practical joker; and it is recorded that by a jest of the practical sort he gave a wholesome lesson to an old civic magistrate, who, at the Sessions of the Old Bailey, was continually telling the victims of cut-purses that they had only themselves to thank for their losses that purses would never be cut if their wearers took proper care to retain them in their possession.
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