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paved streets as few. The tanneries, the lime kilns, the soap vats still brewed a murk of oily smoke, raining soot flakes as big as your thumbnail and making a fog all the year round.
    But the new streets were raised and widened; the new houses were built of brick, not pitch-coated matchwood; and the plague of ’65 had been burnt out of every hole. Back crept the vintners to Three Cranes, the mercers to Paternoster Row; Cheapside once more raucously rang with the cries of ’prentices, and coaches rumbled again past the rails round the black-gutted stumps of Old St. Paul’s.
    In fine, none had fared better through evil days than those same merchants I was speaking of. Their tables grew heavy with gold plate, and four Flanders mares drew their coaches to the Royal Exchange. They were the aldermen of that powerful body, the Corporation of the City of London. As symbol of their pomp, my Lord Mayor rode to the feats at Guildhall in scarlet robe and black velvet hood, with the gold chain around his neck. His trainbands numbered twelve regiments of foot and two of horse; the corporation’s own poet laureate rhymed (somewhat optimistically) the splendour of his name in future ages. Hence your merchant-lords, watching the throng of bubbleheads who bought their gauds in such profusion, could scheme better bargains at Lloyd’s Coffee-House in Leadenhall Street, and drink the soot-black delicacy out of a dish.
    Already a multitude of glass lanterns had appeared before the coffee-houses. A glass lantern was its sign, as a red lattice indicated a tavern. Presided over by pretty jillflirts of accommodating character, they were fair quarters for the inhaling of tobacco and snuff. Though the best of them in the money-changing area might be accounted Garraway’s, off Cornhill; yet these dusky rooms of high-backed settles were the forerunners of all our clubs; and, to taste the true flavour of an institution uniquely British, any foreigner went westward.
    He took an uncertain footing down Ludgate Hill, where the hackney coaches splashed a jolting passage. From here to the Strand, under painted gables, rolled a din of barter and brawling. They cried rotten fruit, jars of usquebaugh, and scrofulous-looking sausages. They hawked mackerel and rosemary, their voices rising as harsh as the clank of passing-bells.
    “Have you,” bawls a tinker, after his rattle of ghostly knocks at somebody’s door, “have you a brass pot, iron pot, skillet, kettle, or frying pan to mend?”
    “No, we have not. Be off!”
    “Come, mistress, a word with you. I’ll adventure it.”
    “Will you so, God damme? Gardy-loo, jackanapes! ’Ware slops below!”
    This may have been witty; it may not. Yet any pedlar, you conceive, must be nimble in more senses than one. Here rattled the crooked lanes of street signs, bright-painted, gilded, carved to huge goblin shapes a-creak in high winds; and an imp-black dwarf of a chimney sweep tripped up an incautious baker, coloured all silver-grey from the dust of the basket on his head.
    Now God help, in all pious sincerity, any impertinent foreigner who went to find the good talk of the coffeehouses in Fleet Street. They always took him for a Frenchman, what they called a Mounzer, and they hated him. They knocked him under waterspouts, pelted him with rams’ horns out of the kennel filth, mashed his toes with the barrels that draymen were rolling into cellars. Does he clap handkerchief to his nose against the smells? Won’t he let the bootblacks brighten his shoes with a polish of soot and rancid oil? That beggar at the corner of Water Lane, who has burnt sores in his own face and festered them to hideousness with powdered arsenic: that bundle of ulcers wheedling on his knees, with white eyeballs uprolled—is the foreigner heedless of his whining.
    “French dog!” screech gamin and slut. “Mounzer! Papist! Lousy spy!”
    Mounzer’s periwig is fouled with beer foam or twitched off as a trophy. Mounzer, who can find