and minor expenses came to about £1 6s. 8d. a week. While in town, he met his friends at the Royal Exchange, and dined with them at one of the many taverns near it; strolled about in Gray’s Inn Walks; went by water to Westminster—his cousin, Roger Allestry, was a Member of Parliament; supplied himself with clothes, books, silver plate and tobacco from the various shops; visited his son, the scapegrace John, who was in the silk trade, being apprenticed to Nicholas Delves, Esquire;[98] and on Sundays attended divine service at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, or St. Paul’s. He had business also to attend to, for on one occasion I find him paying a sum of £200 “att the Southe Porche of St. Paule’s, London.” Sometimes, I suppose, he walked in Hyde Park, or visited Whitehall, where the King and Queen dined in public; but there is no evidence that he had any taste for the theatre, the cockpit, or the coffee-houses. His stay in the “Metropolitan City” usually lasted for a fortnight or three weeks, and the total cost of the visit was about twelve pounds, though as much more was often laid out upon various purchases. [98] This Nicholas Delves is the person who put Titus Oates to school as a free scholar at Merchant Taylors’ in 1664. See William Smith’s _Intrigues of the Plot_, 1685, page 25. Upon the ignorance and illiterateness of the country squires, Lord Macaulay is never tired of dwelling. He tells us that their language and pronunciation were “such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns,” and that a gentleman “passed among his neighbours for a great scholar if _Hudibras_ and _Baker’s Chronicle_, _Tarlton’s Jests_, and the _Seven Champions of Christendom_ lay in his hall window among the fishing rods and fowling pieces.”