elabra, or, wanting these at suppers, there
were living candleholders. "Give me a torch," says Romeo; "I'll be a
candle-holder, and look on." Knowledge of the details of luxury of an
English home of the sixteenth century will make exceedingly vivid hosts
of allusions in Shakespeare.

Servants were numerous in great households, a large retinue being a mark
of gentility, and hospitality was unbounded. During the lord mayor's term
in London he kept open house, and every day any stranger or foreigner
could dine at his table, if he could find an empty seat. Dinner, served
at eleven in the early years of James, attained a degree of epicureanism
rivaling dinners of the present day, although the guests ate with their
fingers or their knives, forks not coming in till 1611. There was mighty
eating and swigging at the banquets, and carousing was carried to an
extravagant height, if we may judge by the account of an orgy at the
king's palace in 1606, for the delectation of the King and Queen of
Denmark, when the company and even their majesties abandoned discretion
and sobriety, and "the ladies are seen to roll about in intoxication."

The manners of the male population of the period, says Nathan Drake, seem
to have been compounded from the characters of the two sovereigns. Like
Elizabeth, they are brave, magnanimous, and prudent; and sometimes, like
James, they are credulous, curious, and dissipated. The credulity and
superstition of the age, and its belief in the supernatural, and the
sumptuousness of masques and pageants at the court and in the city, of
which we read so much in the old chronicles, are abundantly reflected in
the pages of Jonson, Shakespeare, and other writers.

The town was full of public-houses and pleasure-gardens, but, curiously
enough, the favorite place of public parading was the middle aisle of St.
Paul's Cathedral--"Paul's Walk," as it was called--which was daily
frequented by nobles, gentry, perfumed gallants, and ladies, from ten to
twelve and three to six o'clock, to talk on business, politics, or
pleasure. Hither came, to acquire the fashions, make assignations,
arrange for the night's gaming, or shun the bailiff, the gallant, the
gamester, the ladies whose dresses were better than their manners, the
stale knight, the captain out of service. Here Falstaff purchased
Bardolph. "I bought him," say's the knight, "at Paul's." The tailors went
there to get the fashions of dress, as the gallants did to disp