Close under the eye of the spectator here, lies that part of the town formerly the fashionable quarter, but now very much what Red Lion Square, and its precincts, are to London. There is still existing (or there was, some six or eight years since,) the house of Governor Hutchinson, of which the mouldings were brought from London, and in which the drawing-room panels were portraits of his family, in their youth. This is still a very roomy and well-built, and must once have been a rather luxurious house. We are apt to fancy that our strait-laced ancestors from England lived parsimoniously, and denied themselves the elegances of modern luxury; but antiquarian researches exhibit a different state of things. “In the principal houses,” says the discourse of a learned gentleman on this subject, “there was a great hall, ornamented with pictures and a great lantern, and a velvet cushion in the window-seat which looked into the garden. On either side was a great parlour, a little parlour, or study. These were furnished with great looking-glasses, Turkey carpets, window curtains and valance, pictures, and a map, a brass clock, red leather-back chairs, and a great pair of brass andirons. The chambers were well supplied with feather beds, warming-pans, and every other article that would now be thought necessary for comfort or display. The pantry was well filled with substantial fare and dainties—prunes, marmalade, and Madeira wine. Silver tankards, wine-cups, and other articles of plate, were not uncommon; and the kitchen was completely stocked with pewter, iron, and copper utensils. Very many families employed servants, and in one we see a Scotch boy valued among the property, and invoiced at 14_l._” In the matter of dress, our grandames seem to have pushed the ruling passion of the sex even through the rigid crust of Puritanism. In a tract, called the “Simple Cobler of Agawam,” some righteous round-head thus expresses his indignation at their fashions:— “Methinks it should break the hearts of Englishmen to see so many goodly Englishwomen imprisoned in French cages, peering out of their hood-holes for some men of mercy to help them with a little wit, and nobody relieves them. We have about five or six of them in our colony; if I see any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse my phansie of them for a month after. “It is a more common than convenient saying, that ‘nine taylors make a man:’ it were well if nineteen could make a woman to her mind. If taylors were men, indeed, well furnished but with mere moral principles, they would disdain to be led about like asses by such mymick marmosets. It is a most unworthy thing for men that have bones in them, to spend their lives in making fiddle-cases for women’s phansies.