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finery, put him into a mourning coach, and set his body to lie all night in state at a tavern near St. Giles’s, with eight wax tapers burning about the bier and eight black-cloaked gentlemen in attendance. This, then, was at the turn of the year, at the beginning of the second decade in the reign of King Charles the Second; and Claude with his dancing master’s airs might have been put up as a model for the time, like the status of King Charles at the New Exchange.
    It was a noisy time, a posturing time, a time of jigs and of bludgeoning wit: a cruel, swaggering, credulous, clever time, for smoky London on its mud-flats. This New Exchange, on the south side of the Strand, made a shopping centre for the western end of town, waxing rich on my lord and my lady’s passion for gewgaws. Four galleries, inner and outward walk, upper and lower walk, held a clamour of damsels crying finery at their stalls. Very good gloves and ribands, sir; choice of essences, rings, clouded canes with silken tassels; the true wigs of Chedreux, sir, and our dusky Lower Walk very useful for assignations. In the courtyard pigeons fluttered round a statue of His Majesty’s self, looking stately in the dress of a Roman emperor.
    But for the finest knick-knack wonders, the trinkets of China which my lady must have or die of shame, they went further. They went into the darkest City, to Leadenhall Street, where the India House held its sales, its auctions, its raffles and tea drinkings. A prosperous time, this, for the fat merchant companies: for the Turkey Company, the Russia Company, the Africa Company, the newly formed Hudson’s Bay Company; most of all, for the great East India Company. Would my lady have a fall of Mecca muslin, woven with gold and silver? A dragon in speckled porcelain? A caged nightingale? Some gilded jars of snuff and pulvillio, or the stuffed sawfish everyone so much admired?
    It was all there for her. She had my lord’s purse, or somebody’s purse. On any day she could go rolling in her huge springless coach to the India House, where the raffle-wheel spun, and spices were burned in the fire, and opulence served tea out of cups like tinted eggshells.
    A season of prosperity, too, for the toymakers round Fleet Street, who could charm the most sober minds with a jack-in-the-pulpit or an ingenious climbing monkey. His Majesty the King much prized an artfully fashioned clock which was made to run by the motion of rolling bullets down an inclined plane; he would roll bullets for hours at a time. His Royal Highness James Duke of York—who not many years before had been putting bullets to a rather less domestic use, in the war against the Dutch—sat on the floor with a bevy of ladies, playing “I Love My Love with an A,” or enjoyed the Cromwellian pastime of cushion pelting.
    Give us, cried fashion, all manner of toy wonders. Even the Royal Society, under the aegis of their silver mace, gravely played at science with clocks, barometers, vivisection, and chemistry. They exhibited mummies and the livers of vipers. They conceived plans for a steam engine, a housebreaker alarm, and a tinderbox that turned into a pistol; they injected sheep’s blood into a man’s veins, to see what happened, and puzzled their wits over His Majesty’s query about the fish in the water pail. Very remarkable grew the debates of the Royal Society at Gresham College, until they gathered up their flasks and loadstones to run westward before the roar of the Great Fire.
    The fire swallowed thirteen-thousand-odd houses in that year ’66, when Prince Rupert and the Duke of York were scorching the Dutchmen’s tail feathers at sea. Annus Mirabilis, Mr. John Dryden called it when he wrote the poem, in his natural enthusiasm and desire for preferment. Mr. Dryden even had the wondering fish raising their heads out of the water to contemplate the spectacle. And from this ruin a new town had begun to take shape. Kennels were no less foul, sewage as bad, and