When Shakespeare came up to London with his first poems in his pocket,
the town was so great and full of marvels, and luxury, and entertainment,
as to excite the astonishment of continental visitors. It swarmed with
soldiers, adventurers, sailors who were familiar with all seas and every
port, men with projects, men with marvelous tales. It teemed with schemes
of colonization, plans of amassing wealth by trade, by commerce, by
planting, mining, fishing, and by the quick eye and the strong hand.
Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the
men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic
death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou,
Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken
part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of
Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had
suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war,
felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the
marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like
Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the
natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in
Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric
pomp of the Khan of Tartary. There were those in the streets who would
see Raleigh go to the block on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who would
fight against King Charles on the fields of Newbury or Naseby, Kineton or
Marston Moor, and perchance see the exit of Charles himself from another
scaffold erected over against the Banqueting House.

Although London at the accession of James I.(1603) had only about one
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants--the population of England then
numbering about five million--it was so full of life and activity that
Frederick, Duke of Wurtemberg, who saw it a few years before, in 1592,