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CHAPTER VI.
I HAD continued some months in this course of life, and was frequently reduced to very great shifts; on these occasions I had recourse to those accommodating persons, called pawnbrokers, who obligingly lend money at die moderate interest of seventy-three hundred per cent.! as has been clearly proved in a late publication. I sometimes raised the wind by my old expedient of obtaining goods on credit called in the cant language maceing: these I converted into ready money for immediate purposes. By such artifices I contrived to support a genteel appearance, though sometimes bordering on the shabby. My principal enjoyments, indeed, were not of the most extravagant nature, with the exception of theatrical amusements. I commonly spent my evenings (if not at the Blue Lion), at some gen-
