He was born in Cornhill, the year that the gossips there were admiringly eloquent on the glories of the royal tournament and ball at Greenwich, where Henry VIII. helped to break three hundred lances before supper; and then, attired as a Venetian nobleman, led out Anne Boleyn to dance, and set all present calculating on the coming events shadowed forth beneath the lights, by such a pair of dancers. The year was that not uneventful one of 1527. It was a jovial place, that Cornhill, at the time I speak of; less so, perhaps, than some dozen years before, when Chantry priests lounged at the open stalls and talked as familiarly with the tailors’ wives, as French abbés of later days with jocund lady duchesses. The Chantry priests were the Giovannis of the district,—the abhorrence of grave husbands, and the especial favourites of their wives. In 1527 something of this had ceased, but Cornhill was still the emporium of jokes as well as jackets; and many were the witticisms which the apprentices, from their unfronted shops, exchanged with the passers-by, and more particularly with the damsels. The household of our ancient friend John must necessarily have been a jovial one; for when the female head thereof was at the point of death, leaving four sons, three daughters, and an ex-husband to follow her to St. Michael’s, Cornhill, she made a bequest which tends to show the predilections of her family,—perhaps the fashion of the time. She left them ten shillings to be spent in drink, on the day of her funeral; while she bequeathed but half that sum to be laid out in the purchase of bread for the poor. These were only incidental bequests. John Stow, the father, was, like John Gilpin, a citizen of credit and renown; and if he had a place of business in Cornhill, he did not sleep there, as vulgar tailors might. Not he! he had his country house, Sir, and that where you now might look for one in vain—“at the backside of Throgmorton-street.” It was then a rural district, and the old tailor tabernacled with gentility. His immediate neighbour was no less a man than the minister Cromwell. John had a garden forty-four feet long, for which he paid “six and eightpence” annual rent; but Cromwell forcibly took possession of a portion of it, and refused to pay for what he had stolen. Honest John submitted, for the reason that he knew he could get no redress; and perhaps he was residing in dudgeon in Cornhill when his eminent son was compensatingly sent to shed a halo round his name. There is an establishment in the City, drafts on which are not so much coveted as on Jones, Lloyd, and Co. I allude to the venerable Aldgate Pump. Adjacent to the well, to which the “one-arm’d City cow” is now the crown, Stowe, the son, was driving his double trade of hopeful student and rather indifferent tailor, in 1549. A stirring little incident took place in front of his house, which caused him to deeply reflect as to the way in which men wrote history.