made the already unwholesome atmosphere intolerable with garlic. They wrought at water-gilding, clock-making, sign-painting, engraving for book illustrations—although in this department the Germans and Dutch were dangerous rivals. A very few offshoots from the great Huguenot colony in Spitalfields were silk-weavers. There were then as now many savoury, tasting and unsavoury-smelling French ordinaries; and again, then as now, some French washerwomen and clearstarchers. But the dwellers in Leicester Fields slums and in Soho were mainly Catholics frequenting the Sardinian ambassador's chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. French hairdressers and perfumers lived mostly under Covent Garden Piazza, in Bow Street and in Long Acre. Very few contrived to pass Temple Bar. The citizens appeared to have as great a horror of them as of the players, and so far as they could, by law, banished them their bounds, rigorously. French dancing, fencing, and posture masters, and quack doctors, lived at the court end of the town, and kept, many of them, their coaches. Not a few of the grinning, fantastic French community were spies of the magnificent King Louis. Sunday was the Frenchmen's great day, and the Mall in St. James's park their favourite resort and fashionable promenade. It answered for them all the purposes which the old colonnade of the Quadrant was wont to serve, and which the flags of Regent Street serve now. On Sunday the blue, bristly gills were clean shaven, the red nightcaps replaced by full-bottomed wigs, superlatively curled and powdered. The filthy indoor gear gave way to embroidered coats of gay colours, with prodigious cuffs, and the skirts stiffened with buckram. Lacquer-hilted swords stuck out behind them. Paste buckles glittered in their shoon. Glass rings bedecked their lean paws. They held their tricornes beneath their arms, flourished their canes and inhaled their snuff with the best beaux on town. We are apt to laugh at the popular old caricatures of the French Mounseer, and think those engravings unkind, unnatural, and overdrawn; but just shave me this bearded, moustached, braided and be-ringed Jules, Gustave, or Adolphe who comes swaggering to-day from the back of Sherrard Street or Marylebone Street, round by the County Fire Office into Regent Street; shave me the modern Mounseer quite clean, clap a periwig on his head, a chapeau bras beneath his arm, a sword by his side; clothe his shrunken limbs in eighteenth century costume; or better, see the French comedian in some old comedy at the Français or the Odéon, and you will cry out at once: "There is the Mounseer whom Hogarth, Gilray, Bunbury, and Rowlandson drew." And yet I owe an apology, here, to the Mounseers; for it was very likely some courteous, albeit grimacing denizen of Petty France who supplied our Hogarth with the necessary French translation of the gold and silver smith's style and titles to engrave on his shop-card.
I am to be pardoned, I hope, for lingering long in Leicester Fields. I shall have to return to the place often, for William Hogarth much affected it. In Leicester Fields he lived years afterwards when he was celebrated and prosperous. Where Pagliano's Hotel is now, had he his house, the
