ERTAIN words sound like . "Thou vagabond!" must have been at some time or other a gentler than our rude transition would make it. Why not? "" and "" have yet their playful uses. Though we translate illy such of , we may read in Gascoigne:—  
"O Abraham's ! O brood of blessèd seed!"
 
The "goodly and young " of old , we should also but . Besides, "vagabond" lendeth itself to the affectionate of alien tongues, which, to a , may be as good as an argument: what can be tenderer than vagaböndchen, vagabondellino, and a like musical play of over the solid English rock?
 
 
The vagabond is the modern representative of the knight-errant, shorn of his romance, inasmuch as both fall under the definition of a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar does not or attach to any one fireside. The Don of la Mancha, revived in this age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, before he had public life twenty-four hours. But the vagabond proper has an Asiatic cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The Rônin of Japan is a gentleman of leisure, who, not to a chance of seasonable employment, roams at large, settling his private differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, according to his lights. Vagabonds are legally denominated "such as wake on the night, and sleep on the day; and haunt customable and ale-houses, and about; and no man wots whence they come nor whither they go:" a comprehensive statement in three parts, which has, moreover, a whimsical reference categorically to actors, politicians, and bank-clerks. A vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person;and if his name has come to imply variations of decorum, and a in polite circles, it is to be accounted for only on the worn that Satan takes personal care of undedicated energies.
 
Our friend is as the swallow, "born in the eighth climate, and framed and constellated unto all." He is the world's freeman. He strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones his only ritual, and changes of weather the sole political economy of his study, by which he . Everybody's property is his in fief. Terminus and his stakes were never set up for him. He has no particular reason for moving on the first of May, nor for passing the winter in warm quarters. When he is very weary, since he has no tent to strike, nor bed to make, he unconcernedly "lays his neck on the lap of his mother." Neither landlord nor is he; and never has he known a spring-cleaning, nor packed a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He trolls out that strophe which Richard Brome wrote for his , as he swings past inland villages:
 
 
"Come away! why do we stay?
We have no debt or rent to pay,
No bargains or accompts to make,
Nor land nor lease, to let or take:
Or if we had, should that remore us,
When all the world's our own before us,
And where we pass and make resort,
There is our kingdom and our court!"
 
He has his choice of professions: he may have a natural to beg, yet, on the whole, consider it genteeler to steal. He is from Adam's curse. Nobody expects him to work, save in a moment of inspiration. When he has no funds, he travels on his dignity. There is that in his eye which the merchantman, and the maid at the gate.
 
The vagabond, " and spirit," as Horatio would call him, has had his court-painter, who took the portraits of several of his eccentric family in the year of Waterloo, and exposed them for sale in Covent Garden under the title: "Etchings of Beggars, Traders, and other persons of Notoriety," from the life in London town. There the seraphic upturned eyes of "Hot Peas!" there you may see the Hogarthian face and attitude of the one-armed of "Live Haddock!" the pastoral cousin offering "Young (toy) Lambs!" the in pickled cucumbers, his arms akimbo, a fork stuck in the dish on his head, and a surreptitious in his well-conducted eye; ............