3-020-988 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Gallants", by A. C. Gow, in the Winter Exhibition of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, 1869. Engraving of a painting. '...a pleasant peep at a bit of old London...with figures to correspond in costumes of the days of good Queen Bess...a bit of London as Shakspeare may have known it. Here is one of the narrow streets of the ancient City before the Great Fire, with its quaintly irregular rows of houses, chiefly timber-built, and with their successive overhanging stories and projecting eaves and gables, their narrow small-paned casements...There goes the staid well-to-do City merchant, in his long fur-trimmed coat...[with] his comely young wife...that may be the merchant's pretty daughter who is so demurely contriving to escape the observation of those dubious, or at least jealously-regarded foplings...Yet, mark you, the sly puss will glance furtively back at them!...What tryst has now brought our "gallants," in all their bravery of satin slashed doublet, trunk hose, rapier and ruff, feathered cap and new-fangled felt hat, to this City quarter? Whether the prodigals come to negotiate a bill or post-obit, to pay tailors' bills or play debts - or whether to carry on an intrigue commenced elsewhere...we are unable to say'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.