It was not until the time of Charles I. that any material improvement commenced in this neighbourhood. The name of Inigo Jones is connected with the first advances architecture made in this direction, through the spirited exertions of the fourth Earl of Bedford. A few of the princely mansions which rise up in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn are fine specimens of the buildings which were erected about this period. What an uncomfortable place must the old City have been, with its little poking market in Honey-lane, now covered by the City of London School and the Stocks Market, long since removed, and with only one bridge leading into this large London, which was then rapidly bursting its ancient barriers and shooting out far beyond its weather-beaten walls, while all propositions for improvement were considered as death-blows aimed at its old and barbarous privileges. Our forefathers never knew, nor needed, such places as the present Covent Garden Market. We read, in old plays, of the apple-woman at the corner of the street, and the vendor of herbs who passed through those ancient thoroughfares; but of the greengrocers, like those of our own day, we find no mention, for they had no predecessors; and, excepting the cabbage and the parsnip, peas and beans, and the radish mentioned by Izaak Walton, there seems but to have been a scanty supply of vegetables. The potato is of comparatively modern introduction, while fruit-trees appear to have been grown in England from time immemorial; even as far back as the days of the Saxons, we find the vine cultivated in the gardens of the monasteries, and that the monks made their own wine. Their vegetable diet was very limited; and we need no further proof than the quantity of cattle slaughtered for the winter consumption, and salted for the sole purpose of saving the food they would require. Indeed, with the exception of beans, peas, wheat, barley, and a kind of cabbage called kale, we scarcely find any other mention of the vegetables used by our Saxon ancestors. Even in the time of Elizabeth, according to old Tusser, a supper of bacon broth was not to be despised, and a breakfast off the same substance cold, with the addition of a piece of cabbage in its cold state, and a lump of barley-bread, formed the chief diet of the English farmer, washed down, no doubt, by a draught of beer.