obtain intelligence from the fountain head. The galleries pre-
sented the appearance of a modern club room at an anxious
time. They were full of people enquiring whether the Dutch
mail was in, what tidings the express from France had brought,
whether John Sobiesky had beaten the Turks, whether the Doge
of Genoa was really at Paris. These were matters about

which it was safe to talk aloud. But there were subjects con-
cerning which information was asked and given in whispers.
Had Halifax got the better of Rochester? Was there to be a
Parliament? Was the Duke of York really going to Scotland?
Had Monmouth really been summoned from the Hague? Men
tried to read the countenances of every minister as he went
through the throng to and from the royal closet. All sorts of
auguries were drawn from the tone in which His Majesty spoke
to the Lord President, or from the laugh with which His Majesty
honoured a jest of the Lord Privy Seal; and in a few hours the
hopes and fears inspired by such slight indications had spread
to all the coffee houses from Saint James's to the Tower.

predictio

The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most important political institution. Noraus Parliament had sat for years. The municipal council of the City had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens. Public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modern machinery of agitation had not yet come into fashion. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper existed. In such circumstances the coffee houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis vented itself.

The first of these establishments had been set up, in the time of the Commonwealth, by a Turkey merchant, who had acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favourite beverage. The convenience of being able to make appointments in any part of the town, and of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge, was so great that the fashion spread fast. Every man of the upper or middle class went daily to his coffee house to learn the news and to discuss

it. Every coffee house had one or more orators to whose eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, and who soon became, what the journalists of our time have been called, a fourth Estate of the realm. The Court had long seen with uneasiness the growth of this new power in the state. An attempt had been made, during Danby's administration,' to close the coffee houses. But men of all parties missed their usual places of resort so much that there was an universal outcry. The government did not venture, in opposition to a feeling so strong and general, to enforce a regulation of which the legality might well be questioned. Since that time ten years had elapsed, and during those years the number and influence of the coffee houses had been constantly increasing. Foreigners remarked that the coffee house was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that the coffee house was the Londoner's home, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow. Nobody was excluded from these places who laid down his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and profession, and every shade of religious and political opinion, had its own head quarters.

There were

houses near Saint James's Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are now worn by the Chancellor and by the Speaker of the House of Commons. The wig came from Paris; and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's ornaments, his embroided coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel which upheld his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which, long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington, to excite the mirth of theatres. The atmosphere was like that of a perfumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than

1 Thomas Osborn, Earl of Danby, under Charles the Second was Lord Treasurer, and head of a high Tory and Cavalier administration. He joined in deposing James; played an active part under William; and rose to be Marquis of Caermarthen and Duke of Leeds. He was father of the Caermarthen who wor. the good graces of Peter the Great.

strand

If any

that of richly scented snuff was held in abommation.
clown, ignorant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe,
the sneers of the whole assembly and the short answers of the
waiters soon convinced him that he had better go somewhere
else. Nor, indeed, would he have had far to go. For, in
general, the coffee rooms reeked with tobacco like a guard-
room; the strangers sometimes expressed their surprise that so
many people should leave their own firesides to sit in the midst
of eternal fog and stench. Nowhere was the smoking more
constant than at Will's. That celebrated house, situated
between Covent Garden and Bow Street, was sacred to polite
letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and the
unities of place and time. There was a faction for Perrault
and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients.1 One
group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not to have been
in rhyme. . To another an envious poetaster demonstrated
that Venice Preserved ought to have been hooted from the
stage.2 Under no roof was a greater variety of figures to be
seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, clergymen in
cassocks and bands, pert Templars, sheepish lads from the
Universities, translators and indexmakers in ragged coats of
frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John
Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest
nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow
to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy
or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege.
A pinch from his snuff box was an honour sufficient to turn the
head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee houses where
the first medical men might be consulted. Doctor John Rad-
cliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in
London, came daily, at the hour when the Exchange was full,
from his house in Bow Street, then a fashionable part of the

1 Perrault's poem on the "Age of Louis the Great," which urged the superiority of modern to ancient authors, gave rise to a controversy with Boileau, conducted through many long years and bulky volumes.

2 "Venice Preserved," by Otway, appeared in 1682. It long remained one of the most popular acting plays on the British stage.

capital, to Garraway's, and was to be found, surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries, at a particular table. There were Puritan coffee houses where no oath was heard, and where lankhaired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew coffee houses where darkeyed money changers from Venice and from Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffee houses where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the King. dot cai These gregarious habits had no small share in forming the character of the Londoner of that age. He was, indeed, a different being from the rustic Englishman. There was not then the intercourse which now exists between the two classes. Only very great men were in the habit of dividing the year between town and country. Few esquires came to the capital thrice in their lives. Nor was it yet the practice of all citizens in easy circumstances to breathe the fresh air of the fields and woods during some weeks of every summer. A cockney, in a rural village, was stared at as much as if he had intruded into a Kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's

whip of

ام show. Moneydroppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced weap

themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest
friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen.
Painted women,
the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed
themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If
he asked his way to Saint James's, his informants sent him

to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of secondhand embroidery, copper rings, and shouse delovatches that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops and the grave waggery of Templars. Enraged and, mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.

mischie

TRAVELLING IN THE SEVENTEENTH

CENTURY.

(History of England, Chapter III.)

THE chief cause which made the fusion of the different ele
ments of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which
our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all
inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone ex-
cepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done
most for the civilisation of our species. Every improvement
of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and in
tellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the
interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but
tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, and to
bind together all the branches of the great human family. In
the seventeenth century the inhabitants of London were, for
almost every practical purpose, farther from Reading than
they now are from Edinburgh, and farther from Edinburgh
than they now are from Vienna.

It was by the highways that both travellers and goods
generally passed from place to place; and those highways