privilege of their séance, uninterrupted by visitors."

We may here mention a tavern of the South Sea time, where the "Globe permits" fraud was very successful. These were nothing more than square pieces of card on which was a wax seal of the sign of the Globe Tavern, situated in the neighbourhood of Change-alley, with the inscription, "Sail-cloth Permits." The possessors enjoyed no other advantage from them than permission to subscribe at some future time to a new sail-cloth manufactory projected by one who was known to be a man of fortune, but who was afterwards involved in the peculation and punishment of the South Sea Directors. These Permits sold for as much as sixty guineas in the Alley.

JONATHAN'S COFFEE-HOUSE.

This is another Change-alley Coffee-house, which is described in the Tatler, No. 38, as "the general mart of stock-jobbers;" and the Spectator, No. 1, tells us that he "sometimes passes for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers at Jonathan's." This was the rendezvous, where gambling of all sorts was carried on; notwithstanding a formal prohibition against the assemblage of the jobbers, issued by the City of London, which prohibition continued unrepealed until 1825.

In the Anatomy of Exchange Alley, 1719, we read:—"The centre of the jobbing is in the kingdom of Exchange-alley and its adjacencies. The limits are easily surrounded in about a minute and a half: viz. stepping out of Jonathan's into the Alley, you turn your face full south; moving on a few paces, and then turning due east, you advance to Garraway's; from thence going out at the other door, you go on still east into Birchin-lane; and then halting a little at the Sword-blade Bank, to do much mischief in fewest words, you immediately face to the north, enter Cornhill, visit two or three petty provinces there in your way west; and thus having boxed your compass, and sailed round the whole stock-jobbing globe, you turn into Jonathan's again; and so, as most of the great follies of life oblige us to do, you end just where you began."

Mrs. Centlivre, in her comedy of A Bold Stroke for a Wife, has a scene from Jonathan's at the above period: while the stock-jobbers are talking, the coffee-boys are crying "Fresh coffee, gentlemen, fresh coffee! Bohea tea, gentlemen!"

Here is another picture of Jonathan's, during the South Sea mania; though not by an eye-witness, it groups, from various authorities, the life of the place and the time:—"At a table a few yards off sat a couple of men engaged in the discussion of a newly-started scheme. Plunging his hand impatiently under the deep silver-buttoned flap of his frock-coat of cinnamon cloth and drawing out a paper, the more business-looking of the pair commenced eagerly to read out figures intended to convince the listener, who took a jewelled snuff-box from the deep pocket of the green brocade waistcoat which overflapped his thigh, and, tapping the lid, enjoyed a pinch of perfumed Turkish as he leaned back lazily in his chair. Somewhat further off, standing in the middle of the room, was a keen-eyed lawyer, counting on his fingers the probable results of a certain speculation in human hair, to which a fresh-coloured farmer from St. Albans, on whose boots the mud of the cattle market was not dry, listened with a face of stolid avarice, clutching the stag-horn handle of his thonged whip as vigorously as if it were the wealth he coveted. There strode a Nonconformist divine, with S. S. S. in every line of his face, greedy for the gold that perisheth; here a bishop, whose truer place was Garraway's, edged his cassock through the crowd; sturdy ship-captains, whose manners smack of blustering breezes, and who hailed their acquaintance as if through a speaking-trumpet in a storm—booksellers' hacks from Grub-street, who were wont to borrow ink-bottles and just one sheet of paper at the bar of the Black Swan in St. Martin's-lane, and whose tarnished lace, when not altogether torn away, showed a suspicious coppery redness underneath—Jews of every grade, from the thriving promoter of a company for importing ashes from Spain or extracting stearine from sunflower seeds to the seller of sailor slops from Wapping-in-the-Wose, come to look for a skipper who had bilked him—a sprinkling of well-to-do merchants—and a host of those flashy hangers-on to the skirts of commerce, who brighten up in days of maniacal speculation, and are always ready to dispose of shares in some unopened mine or some untried invention—passed and repassed with continuous change and murmur before the squire's eyes during the quarter of an hour that he sat there."—Pictures of the Periods, by W. F. Collier LL.D.

RAINBOW COFFEE-HOUSE.

The Rainbow, in Fleet-street, appears to have been the second Coffee-house opened in the metropolis.

"The first Coffee-house in London," says Aubrey (MS. in the Bodleian Library), "was in St. Michael's-alley, in Cornhill, opposite to the church, which was set up by one —— Bowman (coachman to Mr. Hodges, a Turkey merchant, who putt him upon it), in or about the yeare 1652. 'Twas about four yeares before any other was sett up, and that was by Mr. Farr." This was the Rainbow.

Another account states that one Edwards, a Turkey merchant, on his return from the East, brought with him a Ragusian Greek servant, named Pasqua Rosee, who prepared coffee every morning for his master, and with the coachman above named set up the first Coffee-house in St. Michael's-alley; but they soon quarrelled and separated, the coachman establishing himself in St. Michael's churchyard.—(See pp. 2 and 4, ante.)

Aubrey wrote the above in 1680, and Mr. Farr had then become a person of consequence. In his Lives, Aubrey notes:—"When coffee first came in, Sir Henry Blount was a great upholder of it, and hath ever since been a great frequenter of coffee-houses, especially Mr. Farre's, at the Rainbowe, by Inner Temple Gate."

Farr was originally a barber. His success as a coffee-man appears to have annoyed his neighbours; and at the inquest at St. Dunstan's, Dec. 21st, 1657, among the presentments of nuisances were the following:—"We present James Farr, barber, for making and selling of a drink called coffee, whereby in making the same he annoyeth his neighbours by evill smells; and for keeping of fire for the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chamber hath been set on fire, to the great danger and affrightment of his neighbours." However, Farr was not ousted; he probably promised reform, or amended the alleged annoyance: he remained at the Rainbow, and rose to be a person of eminence and repute in the parish. He issued a token, date 1666—an arched rainbow based on clouds, doubtless, from the Great Fire—to indicate that with him all was yet safe, and the Rainbow still radiant. There is one of his tokens in the Beaufoy collection, at Guildhall, and so far as is known to Mr. Burn, the rainbow does not occur on any other tradesman's token. The house was let off into tenements: books were printed here at this very time "for Samuel Speed, at the sign of the Rainbow, near the Inner Temple Gate, in Fleet-street." The Phoenix Fire Office was established here about 1682. Hatton, in 1708, evidently attributed Farr's nuisance to the coffee itself saying: "Who would have thought London would ever have had three thousand such nuisances, and that coffee