“And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
        The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
        The triumph of his pledge.”

According to Hentzner (1598), the English are serious, like the Germans, and love show and to be followed by troops of servants wearing the arms of their masters; they excel in music and dancing, for they are lively and active, though thicker of make than the French; they cut their hair close in the middle of the head, letting it grow on either side; “they are good sailors, and better pyrates, cunning, treacherous, and thievish;” and, he adds, with a touch of satisfaction, “above three hundred are said to be hanged annually in London.”  They put a good deal of sugar in their drink; they are vastly fond of great noises, firing of cannon, beating of drums, and ringing of bells, and when they have a glass in their heads they go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for hours together, for the sake of exercise.  Perlin’s comment is that men are hung for a trifle in England, and that you will not find many lords whose parents have not had their heads chopped off.

It is a pleasure to turn to the simple and hearty admiration excited in the breasts of all susceptible foreigners by the English women of the time.  Van Meteren, as we said, calls the women beautiful, fair, well dressed, and modest.  To be sure, the wives are, their lives only excepted, entirely in the power of their husbands, yet they have great liberty; go where they please; are shown the greatest honor 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.