that looked out upon a square, where a
platform was raised and a vast crowd was assembled to see the king's
bears fight with greyhounds. This afforded great amusement. Presently a
bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs. After this
tumblers danced upon a rope and performed feats of agility on horseback.
The constable and his attendants were lighted home by half an hundred
halberdiers with torches, and, after the fatigues of the day, supped in
private. We are not surprised to read that on Monday, the 30th, the
constable awoke with a slight attack of lumbago.

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear
and bull baiting. It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for
blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung
the cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter
of public executions. Kiechel says that when the criminal was driven in
the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart
moved from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in
order that he might be strangled the sooner.

When Shakespeare was managing his theatres and writing his plays London
was full of foreigners, settled in the city, who no doubt formed part of
his audience, for they thought that English players had attained great
perfection. In 1621 there were as many as ten thousand strangers in
London, engaged in one hundred and twenty-one different trades. The poet
need not go far from Blackfriars to pick up scraps of German and
folk-lore, for the Hanse merchants were located in great numbers in the
neighborhood of the steel-yard in Lower Thames Street.

Foreigners as well as contemporary chronicles and the printed diatribes
against luxury bear witness to the profusion in all ranks of society and
the variety and richness in apparel. There was a rage for the display of
fine clothes. Elizabeth left hanging in her wardrobe above three thousand
dresses when she was called to take that unseemly voyage down the stream,
on which the clown's brogan jostles the queen's slipper. The plays of
Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of all the dramatists,
are a perfect commentary on the fashions of the day, but a knowledge of
the fashions is necessary to a perfect enjoyment of the plays. We see the
fine lady in a gown of velvet (the foreigners thought it odd that velvet
should be worn in the street), or cloth of gold an