“Not I, madam,” responded the Lilliputian lady; “I stops at the Robin Hood * at merry Hoxton; * none but the lower orders stops at Mother Red Cap's!”
[Original]
And the caravan moved on as fast as the wall-eyed anatomy of a Rosinante could drag it.
* Thomas Dale, Drawer at the Crown Tavern at Aldgate, kept
the Turk's Head Musiek-Booth in Smithfield-Rounds, over-
against the Greyhound Inn, during the time of Bartholomew
Fair (temp. W. 3rd), where he exhibited Scaramouch dances
and drolls, and “the Merry Cuckolds of Hogsden!” It is
stated in the Henslowe papers, deposited in the archives of
Dulwich College, that Ben Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, a
fellow actor, in a duel fought in Hoxton Fields.
The rival tea-kettle poured out part of its contents in the person of a long, lean man, with all his limbs rambling; no way reduceable to compass, unless you doubled him up like a pocket-rule. His wardrobe was illustrative of Jew frippery and Rag-Fair tawdry. He was tricked out in the relics of a ci-devant shirt; his coat was a patchwork quilt, his waistcoat and pantaloons were the sign of the chequers, an escutcheon quartering all the colours of the rainbow.
“In his hand
A box he bore, wherein the pungent dust
Of Dutch rapee, in gaudy state reclin'd.