appreciation of beauty in the rabble—and what a rabble of ruffians it was!—of those days. But London then was no bigger than a provincial town, compared with what it is now. The two ladies speedily found husbands: the Duke of Hamilton married Elizabeth, the younger, after an evening spent in the society of the sisters and their mother at Bedford House, and was in such a hurry about it that he would wait for neither licence nor ring, and, after with some difficulty satisfying the scruples of the parson called upon to celebrate the extempore ceremony, they were married with the ring of a bed-curtain, at half an hour after twelve at night, at Mayfair Chapel. Three weeks afterwards Lord Coventry married her sister, Maria. The Duke of Hamilton dying in 1758, six years after the strange nuptials in Mayfair Chapel, the widow in the following year married Jack Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll. Lady Coventry did not wear her coronet long; in 1760 she died, it is said, in consequence of her excessive use of white paint. Her sister, 'twice duchessed,' survived her many years.

We have far from exhausted the list of the ladies distinguished for wit and beauty who figure in Horace Walpole's 'Letters,' but our space is exhausted. We cannot, however, conclude without a few words on the 'Letters' in question. Their chief value consists in the lively descriptions of public events; not as dry and cold history records them, but by letting us have peeps behind the scenes, so as to see the wire-pullers, the secret machinery, which set in motion the actors on the political and social stage. They show us lords and ladies in their negligés, and how the conceit of a hairdresser, or the caprice of a lady's-maid, may make or mar the destinies of a nation. This copious letter-writing forms indeed an era in our literary history which will never return or be renewed; the prying reporter and the irrepressible interviewer now supply all the world with what the letter-writer communicated to a few friends only. This present age may be called the Age of Reminiscences: everybody is writing his; of making books there is no end!

III.

OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES.

A comparatively small room, considering it was one for public use, with dingy walls, a grimy ceiling, a sanded floor, boxes with upright backs and narrow seats, wooden chairs, liquor-stained tables, lighted up in the evening with smoky lamps or guttering candles, the whole room reeking with tobacco like a guard-room—such was the coffee-house of the later Stuart and the whole Georgian periods. Its distinctive article of furniture was spittoons. In such dens did the noblemen, in flowing wigs and embroidered coats, parsons in cassocks and bands, physicians in sable suits and tremendous perukes, together with broken-down gamesters, swindlers, country yokels, and out-at-elbows literary and theatrical adventurers, meet, not only for pleasure, but for business too. Dr. Radcliffe, who in 1685 had the largest practice in London, was daily to be seen at Garraway's, now demolished, its site being included in Martin's bank; and another favourite resort of doctors hereby was Batson's, where, as the 'Connoisseur' says, 'the dispensers of life and death flock together, like birds of prey watching for carcases. I never enter this place but it serves as a memento mori to me.... Batson's has been reckoned the seat of solemn stupidity.'

Coffee-houses, indeed, had their distinct sets of customers. St. Paul's, for instance, was patronized by the clergy, both by those with fat livings and by 'battered crapes,' who plied there for an occasional burial or sermon. Dick's was frequented by members of the Temple, with whom, in 1737, Mrs. Yarrow and her daughter, who kept the house, were great favourites; wherefore, when the Rev. James Miller brought out a comedy, called 'The Coffee-House,' in which the ladies were thought to be indicated—the engraver having unfortunately fixed upon Dick's Coffee-House as the frontispiece scene—the Templars attended the first representation, and hissed the piece off the boards. Button's, in Covent Garden, was the resort of Addison and Steele, of Pope and Swift, of Savage and Davenant—in fact, of the wits of the time. At this house was the lion's head through whose mouth letters were dropped for the Tatlers and Spectators. The head was afterwards transferred to the Bedford Coffee-House, under the Piazza, and eventually, in 1827, was purchased by the Duke of Bedford, and is now at Woburn Abbey; Bedford's was the successor of Button's, and is described in the 'Memoirs' of it as having been signalized for many years as 'the emporium of wit, the seat of criticism, and the standard of taste.' In 1659 was founded the Rota Club by James Charrington, a political writer, and its members met at Miles's, in Old Palace Yard. Pepys attended one of its meetings on January 10, 1659-60. It was a kind of debating-society for the dissemination of Republican opinions. Coffee-houses, indeed, at that period became important political institutions. Nothing resembling the modern newspaper then existed; in consequence, these houses were the chief organs through which the public opinion vented itself, and so threatening to the Court did, in course of time, their influence appear, that on December 29, 1675, the King and his Cabal Ministry issued a proclamation for shutting up and suppressing all coffee-houses, 'because in such houses, and by occasion of the meeting of disaffected persons in them, diverse false, malicious, and scandalous reports were devised and spread abroad, to the defamation of his Majesty's Government, and to the disturbance of the quiet and peace of the realm.' The opinions of the judges were taken on this ridiculous edict, and they sapiently reported 'that retailing coffee might be an innocent trade, but as it was used to nourish sedition, spread lies, and scandalize great men, it might also be a common nuisance.' On a petition of the merchants and retailers of coffee and tea, permission was granted to keep open the coffee-houses until June 24 next, under an admonition that 'the masters of them should prevent all scandalous papers, books, and libels from being read in them.' This, of course, was a huge joke on the part of the Cabal, who thus constituted the concoctors and dispensers of 'dishes'—to use the hideous word then employed—of coffee and tea censors and licensers of books, and judges of the truth or falsehood of political opinions and intelligence. After that no more was heard of the matter, and the coffee-houses remained political debating clubs, as is proved by the remarks on them in the Spectator and similar publications. See, for instance, Nos. 403, 476, 481, 521, etc.

The first London coffee-house was set up by one Bowman, coachman to Mr. Hodges, a Turkey merchant. Others say that Mr. Edwards brought over with him a Ragusa servant, Pasqua Rosee, who was associated with Bowman in establishing the first coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill. But the partners soon quarrelled. They parted, and Bowman opened a coffee-house in St. Michael's Churchyard, from which we may infer that the public took to the new drink. Rosee issued handbills headed: 'The vertue of the coffee-drink. First made and publicly sold in England by Pasqua Rosee, at the sign of his own head.' The original of one of them is preserved in the British Museum. It is generally said that the second coffee-house in London was that established as the Rainbow (now a tavern) in Fleet Street, by one Fair, a barber, in the year 1657. In the