8. That, towards the increase of the said Fund, all Coals imported into the Port of London shall pay four Pence the Chaldron Metage above what was formerly paid. 9. And, as a further Increase to the said Fund, all Coals imported into the Port of London after the twenty-ninth of September, Anno 1770, the Measurable to pay six Pence the Chaldron, and the Weighable six Pence the Ton, for the term of Fifty Years. And to the Intent that the said Fund may be perpetual, it is enacted, That, after the Expiration of the said Term of fifty Years, when the said six Pence per Cauldron and Ton upon Coals shall cease, then all the Manors, Messuages, Lands, Tenements, Markets, Fairs, and the Duties thereof, and other Hereditaments, Revenues and Income whatsoever, belonging to the City either in Possession or Reversion, shall stand charged with the yearly Sum of six thousand Pounds, over and above the already named Sum of eight Thousand Pounds per Ann.” Dissensions over elections and the mode of elections, scares about plots and the rumours of plots, rejoicings over victory, make up the history of London during the next few years. The losses of the Turkey merchants when, for want of a sufficient convoy, their ships were taken or burned by the French, were a national disaster. The merchant fleet was valued at many millions; the convoy forwarded the merchantmen safely as far as the Land’s End, when it left them to a smaller convoy of seventeen ships under Rooke. They found their way barred by the French fleet; in the fight that followed some of the merchantmen escaped, but the greater number were lost. “Never within the memory of man,” Macaulay says, “had there been in the City a day of more gloom and agitation than that on which the news of the encounter arrived. Money-lenders, an eye-witness said, went away from the Exchange as pale as if they had received sentence of death.” The Queen expressed her sorrow and sympathy and promised an inquiry. The probable cause of the desertion of the merchantmen by the main convoy was that it was not safe to leave the Channel unguarded so long. Everybody who studies London possesses among his collection pictures of the street cries. These drawings generally belong to the later years of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth. They establish the fact that the streets were filled with a never-ending procession of men and women with baskets, carts, wheel-barrows, trays, boxes, all bawling their wares at the top of the voice. You may look into the shop now called an “Oilman’s”; nearly all the things he sells were formerly vended in the street. The conversion of the wheel-barrow and the tray into the shop would prove a chapter in the history of London trade.