Last week the periwigged British bar viewed with interest the unprecedented decision reached in the Manchester Assizes in the case of Smith v.
A huge, periwigged man, bent over his cane by the pain of his rheumatism, he roamed the streets of London, sputtering his brand of Germanic English.
By the evidence of merciless, meticulous William Hogarth and the caricaturists who followed him, 18th-Century London was mostly a hell of rich periwigged idiots and drunken slum.