Rosemary-lane was not only of old, and under its name of Rag Fair, a great mart for cast-off garments, but especially, by some freak of ochlocratic fashion, for breeches. It has had the honour of being noticed by Pope as “a place near the Tower of London, where old clothes and frippery are sold;” and, says Pennant, “the articles of commerce by no means belie the name. There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me to look on him with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man, ‘for,’ says he, ‘I have actually clothed him for fourteen pence.’” And in the ‘Public Advertiser’ for February 14, 1756, we read, as an incident of the locality “where wave the tattered ensigns of Rag Fair,” that “Thursday last one Mary Jenkins, who deals in old clothes in Rag Fair, sold a pair of breeches to an old woman for sevenpence and a pint of beer. Whilst they were drinking it in a public-house, the purchaser, in unripping the breeches, found quilted in the waistband eleven guineas in gold, Queen Anne’s coin, and a thirty-pound banknote, dated in 1729, which last she did not know the value of till after she sold it for a gallon of twopenny purl.” To go a little further back, I may say that the Reformation had other results besides those usually recorded; thus that great event was no sooner accomplished than the brokers and sellers of old apparel took up their residence in Hounsditch, where their great enemy, the Spanish Ambassador, had previously had a residence. Their locality was then “a fair field, sometime belonging to the Priory of the Holy Trinity, at Aldgate.” “Where gott’st thou this coat, I mar’le,” says Wellbred to Brainworm, in Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’ “Of a Houndsditch man, Sir,” answers Brainworm; “one of the devil’s near kinsmen, a broker.”