The London merchant’s house in the sixteenth century steadily improved in solid comfort and even in magnificence. No one will ever be able to restore completely, or even approximately, the London of that century. We do not know the numbers of the great houses; we know only in part their constitutions, their pictures; their art; their carved work. In the streets lying off the main avenues of retail trade, especially in those streets near the riverside, a house was frequently at once a place of residence and a warehouse. One may look upon a street in Hildesheim, for instance, and be reminded of Bishopsgate Street, Aldgate, or Leadenhall Street in the time of Queen Elizabeth. That is to say, the greater number of houses were timbered with tiled roofs; the fronts all covered with carvings painted and gilded; there were scattered here and there substantial stone houses; there were still many houses whose gateway opened from some narrow city lane upon a spacious court, above which stood the hall; the lady’s bower; the rooms for apprentices and servants; and, behind all, the garden. Such a house on a large scale was Gray’s Inn; on a lesser scale Barnard’s Inn and the smaller inns. The College of Heralds still shows the general size of the court; Doctor’s Commons until fifty years ago also illustrated the old fashion of building. Bricks were coming into use, but, in the City of London, slowly. There were still many narrow and noisome courts where the hovels were of wood—making a constant danger of fire and filled with all manner of decaying abominations—a constant cause of disease. By this time all the windows were provided with glass; many of the poorer sort, however, were furnished with the cheap glass which contained the round lumps called bull’s eyes. The shops in the market-places had glass in the upper part, but the lower part still remained open, and was shut at night with a shutter. The goods were exposed outside the window, and the ’prentices stood beside them bawling, “What d’ye lack? What d’ye lack?” In the more important houses the old custom of living in the great hall was still kept up. In all houses the servants and apprentices sat down with the master and his family. The floors were still strewn with rushes, but these, on account of the cost of renewing, were seldom changed, so that underneath them, as Erasmus discovered, lay unmolested an “ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments of fish, and everything that is nasty.” The furniture of the rooms was very different from that of our own times. The following account is taken from _Archæologia_ (vol. xxx. p. 2):—