out of a ship of war; and the different articles of her raiment were carefully kept in "sweet coffers" -that is, coffers perfumed with musk or other rich odors. The dressing of her hair was an equally complicated work, from the quantity of heart-break-century were still little booths or cellars, generally ers that required to be scented and curled, the artificial ringlets that were incorporated with the true, and the jewelry with which the whole was sur mounted. Add to all this the critical process of laying patches upon various parts of the face, and perhaps creating a new complexion with lotions, unguents, and even with paint; and we have half of the every-day history of a fine lady of the period, according to Shirley :

idolatry. "By this light!" exclaims a young trading and promised them, withal, a double payment if they citizen, in Greene's Tu Quoque," I do not think but to be lord mayor of London before I die, and have three pageants carried before me, besides a ship and a unicorn."

From the merchants and shopkeepers we may descend to the apprentices of this period, and, strange to tell, they seem to have been among the chief civic nuisances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These youths, although scattered over the whole metropolis, were formidable, not only from their numbers, but their union; and they seem to have acquired such a reckless ferocity from the consciousness of their strength, that they were always ready to head the minor insurrections and popular riots of the period. In these cases it was in vain for the common city-guard to oppose them; clubs, bills, and partisans" were swept before the whirlwind of a 'prentice onset; and it was often necessary to call out the military against them. One aggrieved member of the fraternity, too, was enough to throw, with a single warwhoop, the whole ward into an uproar. Whether attacking or attacked, he had only to shout the cry of "'Prentices! clubs!" when every shop, warehouse, and street repeated the warning, and every 'prentice snatched up his hat and rushed to the rescue. The 'prentices also had constituted themselves the arbiters and executioners of popular justice, so that if a bull was to be baited in the ring, or a play on the stage-if a bawd was to be carted through the streets, with a hideous symphony of pans, kettles, and keys-if a scold was to be carried to the cuckingstool and ducked, or a house of bad repute to be stormed and sacked-a throng of apprentices generally both decreed and executed the deed. These turbulent lads had also their feuds against certain other bodies, among which the Templars were distinguished; but all foreigners they especially hated, with even more than an English hatred. When the heyday of apprenticeship had exhaled, many of these youths grew sober, rich, and obese, and were thus qualified for civic offices and dignities; but others acquired such unsettled and profligate habits that their dismissal from shop and warehouse was indispensable. Being thus thrown upon society, they were ready for every desperate deed; and from the host of discarded 'prentices a bravo could easily be hired by any gentleman who was base enough to use the services of a mercenary cudgel.1

Such was the audacity of town thieves and robbers in the latter part of the sixteenth century, that on one occasion Elizabeth herself, while taking an airing in her coach, near Islington, was environed by a whole regiment of "rogues and masterless men," and was obliged to dispatch a footman to the mayor and recorder for help. Fleetwood accordingly set his myrmidons in motion, and, by the next morning, seventy-four of the desperadoes were brought before him, some of whom, he says, were "blind, and yet great usurers, and very rich." The worthy magistrate gave them what he calls "substantial payment,"

1 Fleetwood's Letters in Ellis's Collect.-Greene's Ghost-haunting Coney-catchers.

appeared before him again; and he values himself justly upon never having seen them afterward. This Fleetwood, who was recorder of London, appears to have been the Fielding of his day, and, by his indefatigable exertions, he partially succeeded in weeding London, Westminster, and the suburbs, of these pernicious characters.'

Of those persons who were comprehended under the title of coney-catchers (that is, cheats, in opposition to those who used violence), the number in all parts of the kingdom in the time of Elizabeth was estimated at not less than ten thousand. In the country they attended every wake and fair, for the purposes of duping the unwary-plundered out-houses and poultry-yards, and "found linen upon every hedge;" and as they moved about in formidable bands, it was seldom safe for the country constables to apprehend them. But London was their great mart and center of attraction, and the places where they chiefly swarmed were the Savoy and the brick-kilns near Islington. Not less than twenty-two different kinds of coney-catchers are summed up by Holinshed. During the reigns of James and Charles, however, they seem to have not only increased in numbers, but to have carried the principle of the subdivision of labor still further out. They used a cant language for professional communication, resembling that of the gipsies whom they soon supplanted; and in this, as well as in many other particulars, in reading the accounts of the various tricks and stratagems of the rogues of the seventeenth century, we seem to be reading the history of the frauds of London in the nineteenth. In fact, much as we may admire the dexterity of modern thimble-rigging and swindling, scarcely a single stroke of it is of recent origin; every trick was practiced with equal adroitness so early as the good old days of Elizabeth. The cutpurses3 used instruments of the finest steel, made by the choicest workmen of Italy; and they had numerous schools in London, where the rising generation were regularly trained in every species of fraud. One way in which children were taught to pick a pocket adroitly is said to be still practiced in the metropolis. A pocket or purse was suspended from the ceiling, and hung round with small bells, and the young learner was required to finger and empty it without ringing the slightest alarm. All the common knaveries of the town were the same with which we are still familiar. Rustic squires and blunt-witted franklins, coming on a visit to London, were frequently fleeced, or even worse handled, and sent home to horrify their firesides | with tales of metropolitan iniquity. They had gazed at some London marvel, and their purses had vanished the while, as if at the touch of fairy fingers. They had been hailed by city kinsmen of whom they had never heard, and to whom they were persuaded to intrust their property; but

1 Ellis's Collection

2 Holinshed.

3 Purses in those days were worn on the outside of the clothes They were tied round the middle, and hung down by a string, so that they could be easily cut off; hence the name of cut-purse.

Another description of miscreants mentioned in the accounts of this period went about the streets of London with figs and raisins in their pockets, with which they allured children to their houses; they then cropped the hair of their victims, and otherwise so altered their appearance that their parents could not recognize them, after which they shipped them off to the plantations, there to be sold for slaves. The civil wars and the discomfiture of the royal cause produced a plentiful harvest of dash-ies were also common so early as the beginning of ing highwaymen, the impoverished followers of the fallen king, who endeavored to retrieve upon the road what they had lost in the field; and many a gentle and well-born cavalier, who had honorably distinguished himself at Marston Moor or Naseby, had his exit at Tyburn. In their new species of campaigning they comforted themselves with the thought that they were only continuing the war upon a different scale, and resuming what had once been their own; in conformity with which notion,

the writers of these not only sold themselves to one or other party, but even to individuals, whose deeds they exclusively trumpeted. A mercenary partisan of this stamp is thus briefly described in Pepy's Diary: "I found Muddiman, a good scholar, an arch rogue, and owns that though he writes new books for the parliament, yet he did declare that he did it only to get money, and did talk very basely of many of them."

resistance. The obscure, narrow lanes branching from Cannon-street toward the river were clustered with those secret and proscribed buildings called "the tents of Kedar" by their frequenters, but conventicles by the world in general: Leukner's Lane and its precincts were the favorite haunts of the profligate; and the "devilish Ranters," as honest Bunyan justly terms them, held their satanic orgies in Whitechapel and Charter-house Lane. As for places of lounge and recreation, Hyde Park and Spring Garden afforded pleasant retreats to the citizens from the dirt and din of the streets; but, under the commonwealth, the use of the park was restricted by a tax of one shilling levied upon every coach, at entrance, and sixpence for every horse, while the garden, as already mentioned, was shut up. But the chief place of common resort was the middle aisle of St. Paul's; the hours of public concourse there being from eleven to twelve at noon, and after dinner from three to six in the evening. Here lords, merchants, and men of all professionsthe fashionable, the busy, and the idle-were wont to meet and mingle; and he who had no companion might amuse or edify himself with the numerous placards and intimations suspended from the pillars. But the chief of the "Paul's walkers" were the political quidnuncs, who must have found some thing congenial in the gloom of this stately piazza. "These newsmongers, as they called them," says Osborne, in his Letters to his Son, "did not only take the boldness to weigh the public, but most iutrinsic actions of the state, which some courtier or other did betray to them."

People of rank and fashion at this time lived in the Strand, Drury Lane, and the neighborhood of Covent Garden, which was as yet only an inclosed field; merchants resided between Temple Bar and the Exchange; bullies, broken spendthrifts. and criminals of every shade, congregated in Whitefriars (Alsatia), which still possessed the right of sanctuary, and the avenues of which were watched by scouts who, on the approach of the messengers The extent and confusion of such a Babel as of justice, sounded a horn, and raised the cry of London had now become, seemed to stun the intel-"An arrest !" to warn the Alsatians for flight or lects of King James; and besides the proclamations he was accustomed to issue against the building of additional houses, as Elizabeth had done before him, and as was also done by his son and by the government of the commonwealth, he applied himself in various other ways to reform what he considered a serious political evil. He prohibited the Scots from repairing to London, and threatened the skippers who brought them with fine and confiscation. He tried to persuade the English nobles and landed gentlemen to reside upon their estates, telling them that in the country they were like ships in a river, that showed like something; while, in London, they were like ships at sea, that showed like nothing. But his most sapient scheme to thin the city population was, to plant whole colonies of Londoners upon the waste lands of Scotland-a munificent boon to the English, as he thought, by which the advantages of the union of the two kingdoms would be reciprocated. But all these schemes were useless; the torrent swelled and strengthened every hour, and the London population continued to increase in a ratio that far exceeded all former precedent. As yet, however, this increase was not accompanied with those general improvements so necessary for the comfort of civic life. The greater part of the houses were still sheds of wood, or of wood and brick, the wretchedness of which was only brought into strong relief by the stately buildings that here and there intervened; the streets were crooked and narrow, and generally overshadowed by a perpetual twilight, from the abutments overhead, that rose, story above story, until they almost closed upon each other; and, being unpaved, they were damp and dirty even in dry weather, and, in rainy, were almost knee-deep with mud. These discomforts were peculiarly striking to foreigners, who seemed to have regarded London as the valley of the shadow of death. They complained of the universal coughing that resounded through every place of concourse, and they considered consumption to be a national disease of the English, produced by the wet and dirty streets of their metropolis. The expedients that had been for some time adopted to counteract these nuisances were worthy of Asiatic barbarians. Kites and ravens were cherished on account of their usefulness in devouring the filth of the streets, and bonfires were frequently kindled to avert a visit of the plague.

Life of Colonel Hutchinson.

Moryson.-Stow.-Character of England in Lord Somers's Tracts,

vol vii.

The elbowing of crowds and the rivers of mud were not the only obstacles to be encountered in the streets of London. If the peaceful pedestrian eschewed a quarrel by universal concession, and gave the wall to every comer, he might still run the risk of being tossed by a half-baited bull, or hugged by a runaway bear. A sudden rush and encountering between the factions of Templars and 'prentices, or of butchers and weavers, might sweep him at unawares into the throng of battle, where, although he espoused neither party, he might get well cudgeled by both. If he sought to avoid all these mischances by the expensive protection of a coach, he might suddenly find himself and his vehicle sprawling in the kennel, through the rude wantonness of the mob. This last pastime had become a favorite with the London rabble, who called coaches hellcarts, and delighted in upsetting them. In the ha

2

1 Shadwell's Comedy of The Squire of Alsatia.

2 Character of England, in Somers's Tracts.