his colleagues kept exclaiming, "Oh, do look at this one--oh, do see
that! Whose wife is this?--and that pretty one near her, whose daughter
is she?" There was some chaff mixed in, he allows, some shriveled skins
and devotees of S. Carlo Borromeo, but the beauties greatly predominated.

In the great street pageants, it was the beauty and winsomeness of the
London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild. In
1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates
"the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other
delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect." And
in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry of
the queen mother, "this miserable old queen," as Lilly calls Marie de'
Medicis (Mr. Furnivall reproduces an old cut of the scene), M. de la
Serre does not try to restrain his admiration for the pretty women on
view: only the most fecund imagination can represent the content one has
in admiring the infinite number of beautiful women, each different from
the other, and each distinguished by some sweetness or grace to ravish
the heart and take captive one's liberty. No sooner has he determined to
yield to one than a new object of admiration makes him repent the
precipitation of his judgment.

And all the other foreigners were in the like case of "goneness."
Kiechel, writing in 1585, says, "Item, the women there are charming, and
by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld, for they do
not falsify, paint, or bedaub themselves as in Italy or other places;"
yet he confesses (and here is another tradition preserved) "they are
somewhat awkward in their style of dress." His second "item" of gratitude
is a Netherland custom that pleased him--whenever a foreigner or an
inhabitant went to a citizen's house on business, or as a guest, he was
received by the master, the lady, or the daughter, and "welcomed" (as it