The middle of St. Paul's was also the Bond Street of that period, and remained so till the time of the Commonwealth. The loungers were called Paul's Walkers.
"The young gallants from the inns of court, the western and the northern parts of the metropolis, and those that had spirit enough," says our author, "to detach themselves from the counting-houses in the east, used to meet at the central point, St. Paul's; and from this circumstance obtained the appellations of _Paul's Walkers_, as we now say, _Bond-street Loungers_. However strange it may seem, tradition says that the great Lord Bacon used in his youth to cry, _Eastward ho!_ and was literally a Paul's Walker."[22]
Lord Bacon had a taste for display, which was afterwards exhibited in a magnificent manner, worthy of the grandeur of his philosophy; but this, when he was young, might probably enough have been vented in the shape of an exuberance, which did not yet know what to do with itself. Who would think that the late Mr. Fox ever wore red-heeled shoes, and was a "buck about town?"
But to conclude with these curious passages:--
"The Walkers in Paul's," continues our author, "during this and the following reigns, were composed of a motley assemblage of the gay, the vain, the dissolute, the idle, the knavish, and the lewd; and various notices of this fashionable resort may be found in the old plays and other writings of the time. Ben Jonson, in his _Every man out of his Humour_, has given a series of scenes in the interior of St. Paul's, and an assemblage of a great variety of characters; in the course of which the curious piece of information occurs, that it was common to affix _bills_, in the form of advertisements, upon the columns in the aisles of the church, in a similar manner to what is now done in the Royal Exchange: those bills he ridicules in two affected specimens, the satire of which is admirable. Shakspeare also makes Falstaff say, in speaking of Bardolph, 'I bought him in _Paul's_, and he'll buy me a horse in Smithfield: if I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were mann'd, hors'd, and wiv'd.'"
To complete these urbanities, the church was the resort of pickpockets. Bishop Corbet, a poetical wit of the time of Charles the First, sums up its character, as the "walke
