Those were the days of wigs and velvets and extravagance in men’s dress. They wore silk stockings with shoes, or long boots curling over at the top, embroidered coats, lace, frills, and plumed hats. Picturesque and beautiful was their attire. The women’s full skirts were made of handsome stuffs, and rivalry of splendour was still rampant. Verily an age of extravagance. The Ring long remained the chief social centre in the Park. It seems to have been but poorly laid out, judging by Wilson’s description, 1679, in his _Memoirs_, published many years afterwards: “Here the people of fashion take the diversion of the Ring. In a pretty high place, which lies very open; they have surrounded a circumference of two or three hundred paces diameter with a sorry kind of balustrade, or rather with postes placed upon stakes but three feet from the ground; and the coaches drive round this. When they have turned for some time round one way, they face about and turn tother: so rowls the world!” Among the customs of the Stuart and early Hanoverian periods was that of issuing—in the absence of the voluminous Press of our time—“broadsides” and “satyrs” on leaflets, which were distributed through London, and “took off” the leading people and topics of the day. The Ring afforded a rich field for these so long as it lived, and held as important a place in that class of literature as Hyde Park does in our modern Society papers. So much is said about the Park by the diarists Pepys and Evelyn, that the social life of the place may almost be pictured from their pages alone. Pepys is always a delight. One may still see his famous MS. “Diary” in the Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge. It is in four or five volumes of shorthand, neatly written, with tidy margins, and the names of persons and places in well-formed letters in longhand. Presumably he did not intend it for publication, or he would not have written it in shorthand, and that of an extraordinarily complicated nature. Years elapsed before it was deciphered, and still more years passed before it became a classic in literature. Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor; but he became Secretary of the Admiralty, an appointment he filled most ably for many years. He was also President of the Royal Society. His mind was both as refined and as coarse as the age in which he lived. He jotted down the minutest details of the day. At his death he left his library to his old College, and, strange to relate, the double rows in the shelves were arranged by him according to size, and in no way according to subject, so that a tiny note-book of James I. in this remarkable collection comes number one.