bridge, the river was crowded with shipping. At one of the wharves lay
an object of universal interest, the _Golden Hind_, the ship in which
Drake had made his famous voyage round the world.

Within the city, most of the streets were narrow, poorly paved, and
worse lighted. Those who went about by night had their servants carry
torches, called "links," before them, or hired boys to light them home.
Such sanitation as existed was wretched, so that plagues and other
diseases spread rapidly and carried off an appalling number of victims.
The ignorance and inefficiency of the police is rather portrayed than
satirized in Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges. Such evils were common
to all seventeenth-century cities, but these cities had their
compensations in a freedom {55} and picturesqueness which have
disappeared from our modern towns.

+The Citizens+.--In Elizabethan London, as in every city, the men who
represented extremes of wealth and poverty, the courtiers and their
imitators, the beggars and the sharpers, are those of whom we hear
most; but the greater part of the population, that which controlled the
city government, was of the middle class, sober, self-respecting
tradespeople, inclined towards Puritanism, and jealous of their
independence. Such people naturally distrusted and disliked the actors
and their class, and used against them, as far as they could, the great
authority of the city. In spite of court favor, the actors were
compelled by city ordinances to build their theaters outside the city
limits or on ground which the city did not control. Several attempts
were made to suppress play acting altogether, ostensibly because of the
danger that crowded audiences would spread the plague when it became
epidemic. In spite of this official opposition, however, the sober
citizens formed a goodly part of theater audiences until after the
accession of King James, when the rising tide of Puritanism led to
increased austerity. At no time were the majority of the citizens
entirely free from a love for worldly pleasures. They swelled the
crowds at the taverns, and their wives often vied with the great ladies
of court in extravagance of dress.

+St. Paul's+.--The great meeting place of London was, oddly enough, the
nave of St. Paul's Cathedral. This superb Gothic church, later
destroyed by the Great Fire, was used as a common passageway, as a
place for doing business and for meeting friends. In {56} the late
mo