at banquets, where they sit at the upper end of the table and are first served; are fond of dress and gossip and of taking it easy; and like to sit before their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by the passers-by.  Rathgeb also agrees that the women have much more liberty than in any other place.  When old Busino went to the Masque at Whitehall, 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 is termed in their language); “he has a right to take them by the arm and to kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one does not do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his part.”  Even the grave Erasmus, when he visited England, fell easily into this pretty practice, and wrote with untheological fervor of the “girls with angel faces,” who were “so kind and obliging.”  “Wherever you come,” he says, “you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are repeated.  They come to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss them all round.  Should they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance in fine, wherever you move there is nothing but kisses”—­a custom, says this reformer, who has not the fear of Stubbes before his eyes, “never to be sufficiently commended.”