Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/98

 We reproduce four interesting plates by Simon Guillain, who was born in Paris in 1581, and died in that city in 1658. The whole set consists of eighty plates etched by him after Annibale Caracci's Cries of Bologna. They are the prototypes of Wheatley's Cries of London. They represent a Baker with his dishes of capons, a Rosary-vendor armed with wire and pincers to commence repairs, a Pedlar with his pack, and an Onion-seller with his pole, upon which are suspended strings of onions, not a whit different from the Breton peasant-lads who visit this country every season. (Facing p. 68).

It gives an added interest to the print collector to find little touches of human interest; he will fall in a muse reflecting on the suggestions conveyed by many of the details of old prints. In one of Holbein's pictures there is a merchant's ledger bound with that peculiar cross-stitching in strips of white vellum so familiar in the counting-house nowadays. Even the costermonger with his punnets of strawberries, apparently so cheap, is committing a very stale fraud by filling half the basket with fern leaves. When the Pope's Legate entered London in the days of Queen Mary with his cross gleaming from the prow of his barge, a man and a woman were placed in the pillory, so writes Henry Machyn, the Pepys of that day, in his Diary, for selling pots of strawberries, "the which the pot was not half full, but filled with fern."

The pedlar with his tray of gew-gaws reminds one of Autolycus in the Winter's Tale with his song of his wares—"lawn as white as driven snow," his bugle-bracelets and amber necklaces, his "golden