Idle Hours in a Library. William Henry Hudson
favorite resorts of idlers, as they had been long since in the days of Lucian; and owing to the immense attention then paid to hair and beard, the more accomplished among them drove an enormous trade. Their garrulity was proverbial. “Oh, sir, you know I am a barber and cannot tittle-tattle,” says Dello, in Lyly’s “Midas,” in a scene which is full of curious information concerning the barbers of the time. The Cutbeard of Jonson’s “Silent Woman,” is another illustration in point. It may be mentioned, as an odd feature of their establishments, that a lute was commonly kept in readiness for the amusement of those who might have to wait for attention, as the newspapers and comic weeklies are kept to-day. “Barbers shall wear thee on their citterns,” says Rhetias to Coculus, in Ford’s “Lover’s Melancholy,” referring to the grotesque figureheads by which these instruments were often decorated.
In the matter of the relations of sellers and purchasers, we may note, as one of those little touches of nature which make the whole world kin, that customers, as we learn from more than one old play, often indulged in the quite modern practice of having half the goods in a shop laid out for inspection before buying the most trumpery article. Nor, on the other hand, were the dealers of the time much behind their descendants of to-day in what are known as the tricks of trade. Adulteration was a crying evil; some of the methods often employed, for example, for the “sophistication” of tobacco, will be recalled by all readers of “The Alchemist.” Another common practice among shopkeepers was that of darkening their stores to disguise the inferiority of their merchandise. This is constantly referred to by contemporary writers. The sturdy Stubbs attacks the abuse in his “Display of Corruptions.” “They have their shops and places where they sell their cloth very dark and obscure,” he writes, referring to the mercers and drapers of his time, “of purpose to deceive buyers.” Webster, in “The Duchess of Malfi,” employs this familiar abuse in the turn of a compliment: “This darkening of your worth is not like that which tradesmen use in the city; their false lights are to rid bad wares off;” and Quomodo, in “Michaelmas Term,” boasts, humanly enough, that his shop is not “so dark as some of his neighbors’.” Again, Brome, in the “City Wit”: “What should the city do with honesty? Why are your wares gummed? Your shops dark?” In “Westward Ho” we read that the shop of a linen-draper was generally “as dark as a room in Bedlam,” and, not to multiply quotations, Middleton, in “Anything for a Quiet Life,” speaks of shopwares being habitually “set in deceiving lights.” Colliers, too, were so notorious for short measure and other crafty practices that Greene, in his “Notable Discovery of Cosenage,” includes a special “delightful discourse” on purpose to lay bare their knavery.
The houses were not yet numbered, and all trading establishments were known by their tokens—great signboards decorating every shop with strange mottoes and fantastic devices, which took the place of the advertising media of the present day. Milton, we remember, was born at the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, and well on in the eighteenth century the imprints of publishers still refer to these customary signs; as in the case of the famous “left-legged Tonson,” who did business at “Shakespeare’s Head, over against Catherine Street, in the Strand.” Quotations illustrative of these trading tokens and the part they played in the commercial life of the time might be indefinitely multiplied; but we must content ourselves with a single bit of evidence from “The Alchemist.” Abel Drugger, the young tradesman, is opening a new shop, and comes to Subtle to take his advice about the choice of a suitable device. In the one suggested by Subtle, Jonson satirizes the wildly absurd combinations frequently employed, like the foolish advertisements of our own century, to attract or compel public attention:—
“He shall have a bel, that’s Abel;
And by it standing one whose name is Dee,
In a rug gown, there’s D and Rug, that’s drug;
And right anenst him a dog snarling Er—
There’s Drugger, Abel Drugger—there’s his sign.”
It is hardly necessary to add that though these signs have practically disappeared from general use, they survive in trademarks and in the odd and often outlandish trading tokens still to be seen over the doors of English public houses and inns; though just why public houses should have kept up a practice otherwise almost universally abandoned since the numbering of houses came into vogue, it would be difficult to say.
But with the oncoming of the night, silence, for the most part, fell over the city and its surroundings. There was as yet no public lighting of the streets, but the good citizens were supposed to do their individual shares towards illuminating the dark thoroughfares, to insure which the watchmen, with lanterns and halberts, would pace their solemn rounds, hoarsely bawling at every doorway, “Lantern and a whole candle-light! Hang out your lights here!” Writing from Paris in 1620, and referring to the terrible condition of the streets in the French capital, Howell says: “This makes one think often of the excellent nocturnal government of our city of London, where one may pass and repass securely all hours of the night, if he gives good words to the watch.” Yet it is to be feared that this patriotic comment puts the matter in a somewhat too favorable way. The impression one derives from reading the plays and pamphlets of the time certainly is that the roads were always more or less dangerous after dark, and that good, law-abiding townsfolk were best off within doors, or, at all events, in the immediate neighborhood of their own houses. If they were forced to go farther afield, they would do well to take a link-boy with them to guide them with his light, unless they were like Falstaff, who, as we remember, once told Bardolph that he been saved a thousand marks in links and torches walking between tavern and tavern, owing to the fiery and luminous character of the said Bardolph’s nose. A stout ’prentice boy with a well-weighted club was a desirable companion, too, for those who valued purses and pates. For the streets were infested by “roaring boys” and wild young bloods, whose principal amusement, besides fighting among themselves, was in persecuting quiet citizens, and who came into almost nightly conflict with the doting old Dogberry watchmen, who endeavored to cope with them, often with but very slight success. These are the fine fellows described in Shirley’s “Gamester,”—
“that roar
In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets,
And sometimes set upon innocent bell-men to beget
Discourse for a week’s diet,”
and whom Jonson’s Kastril looked up to with so much admiration and respect.
I could not hope by any series of thumbnail sketches to conjure up the manifold details of the daily life of Elizabethan London as one finds it portrayed in the plays of Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Cooke, and the strange pamphlets of Nash and Greene. But we must not linger over these street scenes. It is ample time that we should pass on to consider a little the various classes which went to make up the population of the metropolis in the days of which we speak.
In the common relationships of class with class the age of Elizabeth differed widely from our own. Sociability was one of the main characteristics of the time, and this the guild life of the larger towns did much to foster. In the places of common resort—in the tavern, the theatre, at St. Paul’s Walk, or the Archery Ground at Finsbury, men daily met their neighbors and brother-citizens, and rubbed shoulders and chopped opinions with a warmth and open-heartedness which, if they had little of modern propriety, also knew little of modern restraint. Moreover, London was not then the vast, overgrown, incoherent city which it has since become, and its inhabitants still took that personal interest in one another’s doings, and felt, to some extent at any rate, that sense of family sympathy which, though they are common traits of provincial town life, are characteristic of the metropolis no longer. Nevertheless, the classes remained absolutely distinct, cut off from one another by chasms of custom and interest, and even law, which were never, save with the rarest exceptions, bridged over. The enactments which had been promulgated at the beginning of the reign to fix with rigid certainty the special garbs of the various ranks of the community, are sufficient to show to what extent the caste system, with its attendant prejudices and conventions, was still rooted deep in English life. The young ’prentice might haply make a fortune, and reach a position of great civic distinction. This much was open to him; but for his helpmeet in life he looked no higher than