Inns, of course, which still wore the appearance of the old hotels, and have left a relic for example in the yard of the Spread Eagle, and a more notable one in that of the Talbot, Southwark, had their conspicuous signs, including animals known and unknown, and heads without end. From their huge and hospitable gateways all the public conveyances of London took their departure; and in an alphabetical list of these, in 1684, the daily outgoings average forty-one, but the numbers in one day are very unequal to those in another, seventy-one departing on a Thursday, and only nine on a Tuesday. As there was only one conveyance at a time to the same place, we have a remarkable illustration in this record of the public provision for traveling, as well as the stay-at-home habits of our good forefathers of the middle class, about a century and a half ago. The gentry and nobility were the chief travelers, and they performed their expeditions on horseback, or in their own coaches. As to the number of the inhabitants in London, at the close of the century, only an approximation to the fact can be made, for no census of the population was taken. According to the number of deaths, it is computed there were about half a million of souls--a population seventeen times larger than that of the second town in the kingdom, three times greater than that of Amsterdam, and more than those of Paris and Rome, or Paris and Rouen put together. Though the amount of trade was small compared with what it is now, yet the sum of more than thirty thousand a year, in the shape of customs, (it is more than eleven millions now,) filled our ancestors with astonishment. Writers of that day speak of the masts of the ships in the river as resembling a forest, and of the wealth of the merchants, according to the notions of the day, as princelike. More men, wrote Sir Josiah Child in 1688, were to be found upon the Exchange of London, worth ten thousand pounds than thirty years before there were worth one thousand. He adds, there were one hundred coaches kept now for one formerly; and remarks, that a serge gown, once worn by a gentlewoman, was now discarded by a chambermaid. The manufactures of the country were greatly increased and wonderfully improved by the arrival of multitudes of French artisans in 1685, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes. "An entire suburb of London," says Voltaire, in his _Siècle de Louis XIV._, "was peopled with French manufacturers of silk; others carried thither the art of making crystal in perfection, which has been since this epoch lost in France." Spitalfields is the suburb alluded to; thousands besides were located in Soho and St. Giles's. "London," observes Chamberlayne, in 1692, "is a large magazine of men, money, ships, horses, and ammunition; of all sorts of commodities, necessary or expedient for the use or pleasure of mankind. It is the mighty rendezvous of nobility, gentry, courtiers, divines, lawyers,