Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GEORGE BAEEINGTON, f whpothet tmir pistortan. Most people have heard of George Barrington, the pickpocket. His name has become notorious—I had almost written famous —for gentlemanly larceny. Bulwer has dished up an imitation of him in Paul Clifford, and Lever has introduced him bodily into The ODonoghue. I read once a highly-spiced romance called by his name, and purporting to be an account of his doings, in that oracle of nurserymaids the London Journal, and I came very near to seeing a sensation drama in five acts, of which he was the intelligent hero. I have heard his name mentioned with almost as much admiration as that of Jack Sheppard by pipe-smoking " old hands," yarning while the sheep were camped; and I have seen a picture of him—Claude Duval dashed with Almaviva.—presiding at a banquet as the Prince of Prigs. That he was the prince of prigs in the age of the first gentleman in Europe, there can be no doubt. He robbed with grace, and broke the eighth commandment with an air. He was not such a grand speculator as Price, otherwise Old Patch; he did not ride so dashingly as Claude Duval; he had not the more solid qualities of M. Vidocq, nor the enterprising financial ability of Sir John Dean Paul; but he was, in his way, as smart a fellow as any of them. He lived merrily all his life, and having been transported, made the best of his altered circumstances, took the goods the gods provided him, became superintendent of convicts at Parramatta, wrote a history of his adopted country, and died in the odour of respectability. It is on account of his latter exploit in the way of authorship that I have elected to tell the true story of his life in these pages. Strangely enough, however, though Messrs. Sherwood, Neily, and Jones, of 5 Newgate-street, London, published, in the ...