Who wants some pudding nice and hot!
’Tis now the time to try it;
Just taken from the smoking pot,
And taste before you buy it.
The cry “One-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot CROSS BUNS!” which,—now never heard from the sellers on Good Friday,—is still part of a child’s game, remains as one of the best instances of English quantitative metre, being repeated in measured time, and not merely by the ordinary accent. The rhubarb-selling Turk, who appeared in turban, trousers, and—what was then almost unknown amongst civilians—moustaches, was, fifty years ago or more, a well known character in the metropolis.
Sand was generally used in London, not only for cleaning kitchen utensils, but for sprinkling over uncarpeted floors as a protection against dirty footsteps. It was sold by measure—red sand, twopence halfpenny, and white a penny farthing per peck. The very melodious catch, “White Sand and Grey Sand, Who’ll buy my White Sand!” was evidently harmonized on the sand-seller’s traditional tune.
“Buy a bill of the play!” In the time of our great grandfathers, there were no scented programmes, and the peculiar odour of the play-bills was not due to the skill of a Rimmel. Vilely printed with the stickiest of ink, on the commonest of paper, they were disposed of both in and outside the theatre by orange-women, who would give one to a purchaser of half a dozen oranges or so. In Hogarth’s inimitably amusing and characteristic print of The Laughing Audience, a couple of robustly built orange-women are contending, with well-filled baskets, for the favour of a bewigged beau of the period, who appears likely to become an easy victim to their persuasions.
“Knives to grind” is still occasionally heard, and the grinder’s barrow (vide that depicted in Rowlandson’s illustration on p. 59), is much the same as it was a hundred years ago. At the beginning of the century the charge for grinding and setting scissors was a penny or twopence a pair; penknives a penny a blade, and table-knives one and sixpence and two shillings a dozen.
Rabbits were carried about the streets suspended at either end of a pole which rested on the shoulder.
The edible marine herb samphire, immortalized in connection with “Shakespeare’s Cliff” at Dover, was at one time regularly culled and as regularly eaten.
The once familiar cry of “Green rushes O!” is
“Cherries, fourpence a pound!”