Bow Street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was
about poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There was
a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the
ancients. One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not to have
been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster demonstrated that Venice
Preserved ought to have been hooted from the stage. Under no roof was
a greater variety of figures to be seen. There were Earls in stars and
garters, clergymen in cassocks and bands, pert Templars, sheepish lads
from the Universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats
of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden
sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire;
in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear
his opinion of Racine's last tragedy or of Bossu's treatise on epic
poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff box was an
honour sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusaist. There were
coffee houses where the first medical men might be consulted. Doctor
John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in
London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full, from
his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the capital,
to Garraway's, and was to be found, surrounded by surgeons and
apothecaries, at a particular table. There were Puritan coffee houses
where no oath was heard, and where lankhaired men discussed election and
reprobation through their noses; Jew coffee houses where darkeyed money
changers from Venice and Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffee
houses where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their
cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King.
[130]

These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the character of
the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a different being from the
rustic Englishman. There was not then the intercourse which now exists
between the two classes. Only very great men were in the habit of
dividing the year between town and country. Few esquires came to the
capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all
citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields
and woods during some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural
village, was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a Kraal
of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the