poetic feet. Mr. Joseph Addison is at college. Swift has had the run of Temple's library. Lely has thrown down the pencil; Knelier has taken it up; and James Thornhill is preparing for vast sprawlings on ceilings, after the model of Verrio and Laguerre.
Away with Restoration reminiscences, for the more decent century that is to come. By 8th and 9th William III., Alsatia is ruined, and its privileges of sanctuary wholly taken away. A dreadful outpouring and scattering of ragged rogues and ruffians, crying out in what huff-cap cant and crambo they can command, that delenda est Carthago, takes place. Foul reeking taverns disgorge knavish tatterdemalions, soddened with usquebaugh and spiced Hollands, querulous or lachrymose with potations of "mad dog," "angel's food," "dragon's milk," and "go-by-the-wall." Stern catchpoles seize these inebriated and indebted maltbugs, and drag them off to the Compters, or to Ludgate, "where citizens lie in durance, surrounded by copies of their freedom." Alewives accustomed to mix beer with rosin and salt deplore the loss of their best customers; for their creed was Pistol's advice to Dame Quickly, "Trust none;" and the debased vagabonds who crowded the drinking-shops—if they drank till they were as red as cocks and little wiser than their combs, if they occasionally cut one another's throats in front of the bar, or stabbed the drawer for refusing to deliver strong waters without cash—could sometimes borrow, and sometimes beg, and sometimes steal money, and then they drank and paid. No use was there in passing bad money in Alsatia, when every sanctuary man and woman knew how to coin and to clip it. You couldn't run away from your lodgings in Alsatia, for so soon as you showed your nose at the Whitefriars' gate, in Fleet Street, the Philistines were upon you. Oh! for the ruffianly soldados, the copper captains, the curl'd-pate braggarts, the poltroons who had lost their ears in the pillory, and swore they had been carried off by the wind of a cannon-shot at Sedgemoor! Oh! for the beauteous slatterns, the Phrynes and Aspasias of this Fleet Street Athens, with their paint and their black visor masques; their organ-pipe head-*dresses, their low stomachers, and their high-heeled shoes; the tresses of dead men's hair they thatched their poor bald crowns withal; the live fools' rings and necklaces they sported between taking out and pawning in! Beggars, cut-purses, swindlers, tavern-bilks, broken life-guardsmen, foreign counts, native highwaymen, and some poor honest unfortunates, the victims of a Draconic law of debtor and creditor, all found their Patmos turn out to be a mere shifting quicksand. The town does not long remain troubled with these broken spars and timbers of the wrecked ship—once a tall caravel—Humanity. Don't you remember when the "Holy Land" of St. Giles's was pulled down to build New Oxford Street, what an outcry arose as to where the dispossessed Gilesians were to find shelter? and don't you remember how quickly they found congenial holes and corners into which to subside—dirt to dirt, disease to disease, squalor to squalor, rags to rags? So with the Alsatians. A miserable compensation is made to them for their lost sanctuary by the statute which quashes all foregone
