And I Am
Informed That Some Needy Tradesmen Employ Fellows To Run Hawking
About The Streets With Their Goods, And Sell Pennyworths, In Order
To Furnish Themselves With A Little Money.
As to the recreations of the citizens, many of them are entertained
in the same manner as the quality
Are, resorting to the play, park,
music-meetings, &c.; and in the summer they visit Richmond,
Hampstead, Epsom, and other neighbouring towns, where horse-racing,
and all manner of rural sports, as well as other diversions, are
followed in the summer season.
Towards autumn, when the town is thin, many of the citizens who deal
in a wholesale way visit the distant parts of the kingdom to get in
their debts, or procure orders for fresh parcels of goods; and much
about the same time the lawyers are either employed in the several
circuits, or retired to their country seats; so that the Court, the
nobility and gentry, the lawyers, and many of the citizens being
gone into the country, the town resumes another face. The west end
of it appears perfectly deserted; in other parts their trade falls
off; but still in the streets about the Royal Exchange we seldom
fail to meet with crowds of people, and an air of business in the
hottest season.
I have heard it affirmed, however, that many citizens live beyond
their income, which puts them upon tricking and prevaricating in
their dealings, and is the principal occasion of those frequent
bankruptcies seen in the papers; ordinary tradesmen drink as much
wine, and eat as well, as gentlemen of estates; their cloth, their
lace, their linen, are as fine, and they change it as often; and
they frequently imitate the quality in their expensive pleasures.
As to the diversions of the inferior tradesmen and common people on
Sundays and other holidays, they frequently get out of town; the
neighbouring villas are full of them, and the public-houses there
usually provide a dinner in expectation of their city guests; but if
they do not visit them in a morning, they seldom fail of walking out
in the fields in the afternoon; every walk, every public garden and
path near the town are crowded with the common people, and no place
more than the park; for which reason I presume the quality are
seldom seen there on a Sunday, though the meanest of them are so
well dressed at these times that nobody need be ashamed of their
company on that account; for you will see every apprentice, every
porter, and cobbler, in as good cloth and linen as their betters;
and it must be a very poor woman that has not a suit of Mantua silk,
or something equal to it, to appear abroad in on holidays.
And now, if we survey these several inhabitants in one body, it will
be found that there are about a million of souls in the whole town,
of whom there may be 150,000 men and upwards capable of bearing
arms, that is, between eighteen and sixty.
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