elves into ruin besides those, and some that need
explaining and enlarging upon.

1. Some, especially retailers, ruin themselves by fixing their shops in
such places as are improper for their business. In most towns, but
particularly in the city of London, there are places as it were
appropriated to particular trades, and where the trades which are placed
there succeed very well, but would do very ill any where else, or any
other trades in the same places; as the orange-merchants and wet-salters
about Billingsgate, and in Thames Street; the coster-mongers at the
Three Cranes; the wholesale cheesemongers in Thames Street; the mercers
and drapers in the high streets, such as Cheapside, Ludgate Street,
Cornhill, Round Court, and Grace-church Street, &c.

Pray what would a bookseller make of his business at Billingsgate, or a
mercer in Tower Street, or near the Custom-house, or a draper in Thames
Street, or about Queen-hithe? Many trades have their peculiar streets,
and proper places for the sale of their goods, where people expect to
find such shops, and consequently, when they want such goods, they go
thither for them; as the booksellers in St Paul's churchyard, about the
Exchange, Temple, and the Strand, &c., the mercers on both sides
Ludgate, in Round Court, and Grace-church and Lombard Streets; the
shoemakers in St Martins le Grand, and Shoemaker Row; the coach-makers
in Long-acre, Queen Street, and Bishopsgate; butchers in Eastcheap; and
such like.

For a tradesman to open his shop in a place unresorted to, or in a place
where his trade is not agreeable, and where it is not expected, it is no
wonder if he has no trade. What retail trade would a milliner have among
the fishmongers' shops on Fishstreet-hill, or a toyman about
Queen-hithe? When a shop is ill chosen, the tradesman starves; he is out
of the way, and business will not follow him that runs away from it:
suppose a ship-chandler should set up in Holborn, or a block-maker in
Whitecross Street, an anchor-smith at Moorgate, or a coachmaker in
Redriff, and the like!

It is true, we have seen a kind of fate attend the very streets and rows
where such trades have been gathered together; and a street, famous some
years ago, shall, in a few years after, be quite forsaken; as
Paternoster Row for mercers, St Paul's Churchyard for woollen-drapers;
both the Eastcheaps for butchers; and now you see hardly any of those
trades left in those places.

I mention it for th