The making of lanthorns was a great trade in the early times. We clung to King Alfred's invention for the preservation of light with as reverend a love, during many centuries, as we bestowed upon his civil institutions. The horn of the favoured utensil was a very dense medium for illumination, but science had substituted nothing better; and, even when progressing people carried about a neat glass instrument with a brilliant reflector, the watchman held to his ponderous and murky relic of the past, making "night hideous" with his voice, to give news of the weather, such as: "Past eleven, and a starlight night;" or "Past one o'clock, and a windy morning;" in fact, disturbed your rest to tell you "what's o'clock." We are told by the chroniclers that, as early as 1416, the mayor, Sir Henry Barton, ordered lanthorns and lights to be hanged out on the winter evenings, betwixt Allhallows and Candlemass. For three centuries this practice subsisted, constantly evaded, no doubt through the avarice or poverty of individuals, sometimes probably disused altogether, but still the custom of London up to the time of Queen Anne. The cry of the watchman, "Hang out your Lights," was an exhortation to the negligent, which probably they answered only by snores, equally indifferent to their own safety and the public preservation. A worthy mayor in the time of Queen Mary provided the watchman with a bell, with which instrument he accompanied the music of his voice down to the days of the Commonwealth. The "Statutes of the Streets," in the time of Elizabeth, were careful enough for the preservation of silence in some things. They prescribed that, "no man shall blow any horn in the night, or whistle after the hour of nine o'clock in the night, under pain of imprisonment;" and, what was a harder thing to keep, they also forbade a man to make any "sudden outcry in the still of the night, as making any affray, or beating his wife." Yet a privileged man was to go about knocking at doors and ringing his alarum--an intolerable nuisance if he did what he was ordered to do. [Illustration: THE WATCH--SHAKESPEARE'S LONDON.] But the watchmen were, no doubt, wise in their generation. With honest Dogberry, they could not "see how sleeping should offend;" and after the watch was set, they probably agreed to "go sit upon the church bench till two, and then all to bed." [Illustration: THE BELLMAN--FROM DEKKER, 1608.]