great things; they have cured princes, and persons of the first
quality, as they pretend; and it must be confessed their patients
are as credulous as they can desire, taken with grand pretences, and
the assurance of the impostor, and frequently like things the better
that are offered them out of the common road.

I come in the next place to treat of attorneys' clerks, apprentices,
inferior tradesmen, coachmen, porters, servants, and the lowest
class of men in this town, which are far the most numerous: and
first of the lawyers' clerks and apprentices, I find it a general
complaint that they are under no manner of government; before their
times are half out, they set up for gentlemen; they dress, they
drink, they game, frequent the playhouses, and intrigue with the
women; and it is no uncommon thing with clerks to bully their
masters, and desert their service for whole days and nights whenever
they see fit.

As to the ordinary tradesmen, they live by buying and selling; I
cannot say they are so eminent for their probity as the merchants
and tradesmen of the first rate; they seem to have a wrong bias
given them in their education; many of them have no principles of
honour, no other rule to go by than the fishmonger, namely, to get
what they can, who consider only the weakness or ignorance of the
customer, and make their demands accordingly, taking sometimes half
the price they ask. And I must not forget the numbers of poor
creatures who live and maintain their families by buying provisions
in one part of the town, and retailing them in another, whose stock
perhaps does not amount to more than forty or fifty shillings, and
part of this they take up (many of them) on their clothes at a
pawnbroker's on a Monday morning, which they make shift to redeem on