(I remember forty years
ago, as a boy in London city, a score of cheery, familiar cries that are
silent now). Fancy the beaux thronging to the chocolate-houses, tapping
their snuff-boxes as they issue thence, their periwigs appearing over
the red curtains. Fancy Saccharissa,[26] beckoning and smiling from the
upper windows, and a crowd of soldiers brawling and bustling at the
door--gentlemen of the Life Guards, clad in scarlet, with blue facings,
and laced with gold at the seams; gentlemen of the Horse Grenadiers, in
their caps of sky-blue cloth, with the garter embroidered on the front
in gold and silver; men of the Halberdiers, in their long red coats, as
bluff Harry left them, with their ruff and velvet flat caps. Perhaps the
King's Majesty himself is going to St. James's as we pass. If he is
going to Parliament, he is in his coach-and-eight, surrounded by his
guards and the high officers of his crown. Otherwise his Majesty only
uses a chair, with six footmen walking before, and six yeomen of the
guard at the sides of the sedan. The officers in waiting follow the king
in coaches. It must be rather slow work.

[Footnote 26: Saccharissa is the name under which Lady Dorothy Sidney
is known through some of the poems of Waller, who wrote her praises
under that name. She was of the family of Penshurst, to which belonged
Sir Philip and Algernon Sidney.]

Our _Spectator_ and _Tatler_ are full of delightful glimpses of the
town life of those days. In the company of that charming guide, we may
go to the opera, the comedy, the puppet show, the auction, even the
cockpit; we can take boat at Temple Stairs, and accompany Sir Roger de
Coverley and Mr. Spectator to Spring Garden--it will be called
Vauxhall a few years hence, when Hogarth will paint for it. Would you
not like to step back into the past, and be introduced to Mr.
Addison?--not the Right Honorable Joseph Addison, Esq., George the
First's Secretary of State, but to the delightful painter of
contemporary manners; the man who, when in good humor himself, was the
pleasantest companion in all England. I should like to go into
Lockit's with him, and drink a bowl along with Sir R. Steele (who has
just been knighted by King George, and who does not happen to have
any money to pay his share of the reckoning). I should not care to
follow Mr. Addison to his secretary's office in Whitehall. There we
get into politics. Our business is pleasure, and the town, and the
coffee-house,