Here are types and institutions from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth poets and sedan-chair operators; coffee-house wits and night watchmen; “pretty fellows” and shoeblacks; kickshaws, macaronies, ordinaries, bucks and bloods, and cabinets of curiosities—a kaleidoscope of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life for the historian, the historical novelist, or anyone who takes delight in the gone-but-not-forgotten past of a great modern city.