Let us look into the newspapers for January 1773, that our readers may compare the events of that month with January 1873, a hundred years later. We find the laureate Whitehead’s official New Year Ode sung at court to Boyce’s music, while king, queen, courtiers and guests yawned at the vocal dulness, and were glad when it was all over. We enter a church and listen to a clergyman preaching a sermon; on the following day we see the reverend gentleman drilling with other recruits belonging to a regiment of the Guards, into which he had enlisted. The vice of gambling was ruining hundreds in London, the suburbs of which were infested by highwaymen, who made a very pretty living of it--staking only their lives. We go to the fashionable noon-day walk in the Temple Gardens, and encounter an eccentric promenader who is thus described: ‘He wore an old black waistcoat which was quite threadbare, breeches of the same colour and complexion; a black stocking on one leg, a whitish one on the other; a little hat with a large gold button and loop, and a tail, or rather club, as thick as a lusty man’s arm, powdered almost an inch thick, and under the club a quantity of hair resembling a horse’s tail. In this dress he walked and mixed with the company there for a considerable time, and occasioned no little diversion.’ The style of head-decoration then patronised by the ladies was quite as nasty and offensive as that which was in vogue about ten years ago. It was ridiculed in the popular pantomime ‘Harlequin Sorcerer.’ Columbine was to be seen in her dressing-room attended by her lover, a macaroni, and a hairdresser. On her head was a very high tower of hair, to get at which was impossible for the _friseur_ till Harlequin’s wand caused a ladder to rise, on the top rung of which the _coiffeur_ was raised to the top surface of Columbine’s chignon; having dressed which they all set off for the Pantheon. While pantomime was thus triumphant at Covent Garden there was something like cavalry battles close to London; that is to say, engagements between mounted smugglers and troops of Scots Greys. The village Tooting in this month was a scene of a fight, in which both parties shot and cut down antagonists with as much alacrity as if they were foreign invaders, where blood, and a good deal of it, was lavishly spilt. Sussex was a favourite battle-field; a vast quantity of tea and brandy, and other contraband, was drunk in Middlesex and neighbouring counties where there was sympathy for smugglers, who set their lives on a venture and enabled people to purchase articles duty free.