When we
consider the ignorance of thieves in general, their total want of
education, the slight knowledge which they possess even of their
mother tongue, it is hardly reasonable to suppose that in any
country they were ever capable of having recourse to foreign
languages, for the purpose of enriching any peculiar vocabulary or
phraseology which they might deem convenient to use among
themselves; nevertheless, by associating with foreign thieves, who
had either left their native country for their crimes, or from a
hope of reaping a rich harvest of plunder in other lands, it would
be easy for them to adopt a considerable number of words belonging
to the languages of their foreign associates, from whom perhaps
they derived an increase of knowledge in thievish arts of every
description. At the commencement of the fifteenth century no
nation in Europe was at all calculated to vie with the Italian in
arts of any kind, whether those whose tendency was the benefit or
improvement of society, or those the practice of which serves to
injure and undermine it. The artists and artisans of Italy were to
be found in all the countries of Europe, from Madrid to Moscow, and
so were its charlatans, its jugglers, and multitudes of its
children, who lived by fraud and cunning.
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