Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/621

] in Edinburgh to a recent period; and thieves and pickpockets assaulting the passers by from dark entries below. Chelsea Hospital, from an old engraving.

The city apprentices still kept up their riotous character. On one occasion, having attacked and beaten their masters, they were some of them put into the pillory; whereupon they tore clown the pillory, and when set up again, they again pulled it down. There were feuds and street encounters everywhere. The weavers and butchers, the frequenters of bear-gardens and theatres, or sword-players, were continually falling into parties and ending the dispute by a general melée. Macaulay has given the following account of the treatment which a visitor from the country used to meet with in this refined capital:—"When the lord of a Lincolnshire or a Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel, hackney-coachmen splashed him from head to foot, thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, whilst he stood entranced by the splendour of the lord mayor's show; money-droppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared the most honest, friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen; painted women, the refuse of Leuckner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked the way to St. James's, his informant sent him to Mile End; if he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy—of second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not go; if he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he became the mark for the insolent derision of fops, and the grave waggery of templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon retuned to his mansion." Nell Gwynne's Looking Glass.

The aristocracy had evacuated the city—especially since the fire—and had located themselves along the Strand, Lincoln's Inn Fields, Bloomsbury, Soho, and all quarters tending towards Whitehall; others located themselves in Covent Garden; and in the fields now covered by the piles of