tairs abreast. The rents would seem curiously low to Londoners of
our time; houses could be got in Pall Mall for two hundred a year, and
in good parts of the town for thirty, forty, and {70} fifty pounds a
year. Lady Wentworth, in 1705, describes a house in Golden Square,
with gardens, stables, and coach-house, the rent of which was only
threescore pounds a year. Pretty riverside houses let at from five to
ten pounds a year. Lodgings would seem cheap now, though they were not
held so then, for Swift complains of paying eight shillings a week,
when he lodged in Bury Street, for a dining-room and bedroom on the
first floor.

[Sidenote: 1714--"Not without danger walk these streets"]

There was no general numbering of houses in 1714; that movement of
civilization did not take place until 1764. Places were known by their
signs, or their vicinity to a sign. "Blue Boars," "Black Swans," and
"Red Lions" were in every street, and people lived at the "Red Bodice,"
or over against the "Pestle." The _Tatler_ tells a story of a young
man seeking a house in Barbican for a whole day through a mistake in a
sign, whose legend read, "This is the Beer," instead of "This is the
Bear." Another tried to get into a house at Stocks Market, under the
impression that he was at his own lodgings at Charing Cross, being
misled by the fact that there was a statue of the King on horseback in
each place. Signs were usually very large, and jutted so far out from
the houses that in narrow streets they frequently touched one another.
As it was the fashion to have them carefully painted, carved, gilded,
and supported by branches of wrought iron, they were often very costly,
some being estimated as worth more than a hundred guineas.

The ill-paved streets were too often littered with the refuse which
careless householders, reckless of fines, flung into the open way. In
wet weather the rain roared along the kennel, converting all the
accumulated filth of the thoroughfare into loathsome mud. The
gutter-spouts, which then projected from every house, did not always
cast their cataracts clear of the pavement, but sometimes soaked the
unlucky passer-by who had not kept close to the wall. Umbrellas were
the exclusive privilege of women; men never thought of carrying them.
Those whose business or pleasure called them abroad in rainy {71}
weather, and who did not own carriages, might hire one of the eight
hundred two-horsed hackney carriages; jolting,