By this time, too, the companies were at their richest; their charities were at their fullest; their banquets and functions were most lavish and splendid.
Take the rich Company of Haberdashers alone for its benefactions. This company maintained two free-schools in London and three in the country; two almshouses in London and two in the country; it presented to six benefices in the country; it provided three lectureships in city churches and one in the University of Cambridge; it gave five exhibitions to Cambridge, and it provided pensions for forty-eight poor men and women. In these charities the company disbursed about £3400 a year. At the present day it gives away a great deal more owing to the increased value of its property, but as London is so much larger the effect is not so great in proportion. This list of charities, again, does not include the execution of certain testamentary and private charities, as broadcloth to poor widows, gifts to prisoners for debt, payments for ringing the church-bell, weekly doles of bread, and so forth. The Haberdashers' Company was one of the twelve great companies, all wealthy. If each of these gave away yearly the sum of £2000 only, we have £24,000 a year. There were, besides, all the smaller companies, and not one without some funds for charity, education, or pensions. A boy born in the City might be educated by his father's company, apprenticed to the company, taught his trade by the company, found in work by the company, feasted once a year by the company, pensioned by the company, buried by the company, and his children looked after by the company. If he fell into debt, and so arrived at Ludgate Hill Prison, the bounty of the company followed him there. And even if he disgraced himself and was lodged in Newgate, the company augmented the daily ration of bread with something more substantial. In all, there were (and are) eighty-four City companies, representing every trade except those which are of modern origin. Among these are not counted such companies as the Whitawers, the Fustarers, and the Megusers, long since dissolved. But the Pewterers, the Bowyers, the Fletchers, the Long Bowstring Makers, the Patten Makers, and the Loriners have survived the trades which they were founded to maintain. Some of them have no hall and very small endowments. One, the Card Makers, presents each member of the company with a pack of playing-cards every year, and with this single act expends, I believe, all the endowment which it possesses.
By poetic license, quite pardonable when assumed by Austin Dobson or by Praed, we speak of the leisure of the eighteenth century. Where is it—this leisure? I can find it nowhere. In London City the sober merchant who walks so gravely on 'Change is an eager, venturesome trader, pushing out his cargoes into every quarter of the globe, as full of enterprise as an Elizabethan, following the flag wherever that leads, and driving the flag before him. He belongs to a battling, turbulent time. His blood is full of fight. He makes enormous profits; sometimes he makes enormous losses; then he breaks; he goes under; he never lifts up his head again; he is submerged—he and his, for the City has plenty of benevolence, but little pity. We are all pushing, struggling, fighting to get ahead. We cannot stop to lift up one that has fallen and is trampled under foot. In the City there stands behind us a Fury armed with a knotted scourge. Let us work, my brothers, let us never cease to work, for this is the terrible pitiless demon called Bankruptcy. If there is no leisure or quiet among the sober citizens, where shall we look for it? In the country? We are not here concerned with the country, but I have looked for it there and I cannot find it.
It was the dream of every tradesman not only to escape this fiend, but in fulness of time to retire from his shop and to have his own country-house; or, if that could not be compassed, to have a box three or four miles from town—at Stockwell, Clapham, Hoxton, or Bow, or Islington—whither he might drive on Saturday or other days, in a four-wheeled chaise. He loved to add a bow-window to the front, at which he would sit and watch the people pass, his wine before him, for the admiration and envy of all who beheld. The garden at the back, thirty feet long by twenty broad, he laid out with great elegance. There was a gravel-walk at each end, a pasteboard grenadier set up in one walk, and a sundial in the other. In the middle there was a basin with two artificial swans, over which he moralized: "Sir, I bought those fowls seven years ago. They were then as white as could be made. Now they are black. Let us learn that the strongest things decay, and consider the flight of time." He put weathercocks on his house-top, and when they pointed different ways he reflected that there is no station so exalted as to be free from the inconsistencies and wants of life.
His wife, of course, was a notable house-keeper. It is recorded of her that she would never employ a man unless he could whistle. So that when he was sent to draw beer, or to bottle wine, or to pick cherries, or to gather strawberries, by whistling all the time he proved that his mouth was empty, because you cannot whistle with anything in your mouth. She made her husband take off his shoes before going up-stairs; she lamented the gigantic appetites of the journeymen whom they had to keep "peck and perch" all the year round; she loved a pink sash and a pink ribbon, and when she went abroad she was genteelly "fetched" by an apprentice or one of the journeymen with candle and lantern.
ST. JAMES'S PALACE—MARCH OF THE GUARDS
The amusements and sights of London were the Tower, the Monument, St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, the British Museum (after the year 1754, when it was first opened), the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, Guildhall, the East India House, the Custom-house, the Excise Office, the Navy Office, the bridges, the Horse Guards, the squares, the Inns of Court, St. James's Palace, the two theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, the Opera-house, Ranelagh, Sadler's Wells, Vauxhall, Astley's, the Park, the tea-gardens, Don Saltero's, Chelsea, the trials at the Old Bailey, the hangings at Newgate, the Temple Gardens, the parade of the Judges to Westminster Hall, the charity children at St. Paul's, Greenwich Fair, the reviews of the troops, the House of Lords when the King is present and the peers are robed, Smithfield, Billingsgate, Woolwich, Chelsea Hospital, Greenwich Hospital, and the suburbs. With these attractions a stranger could get along for a few days without much fear of ennui.
The London fairs—Bartholomew, Greenwich, Southwark, May Fair—no longer, of course, pretended to have anything to do with trade. They were simply occasions for holiday-making and indulgence in undisguised license and profligacy. They had bull and bear baiting, cock-fighting, prize-fighting, cudgel-playing—these of course. They also had their theatres and their shows and their jugglers. They had races of women, fights of women, and dancing of girls for a prize. They continued the old morris-dance of five men, Maid Marian and Tom Fool, the last with a fox-brush in his hat, and bells on his legs and on his coat-tails. They were fond of rope-dancing—in a word, the fairs drew together all the rascality of the town and the country around. May Fair was stopped in the year 1708, but was revived some years afterwards. Southwark Fair, which was opened by the Lord Mayor and sheriffs riding over the bridge through the borough, was not suppressed till 1763. The only good thing it did was to collect money for the poor prisoners of Marshalsea Prison. Bartholomew and Greenwich Fair continued till thirty or forty years ago.